Integrating SharePoint with Microsoft Content Management Server

Now that we have examined content management both in Microsoft Content Management Server and SharePoint Portal Server, what about harnessing both at once for your site? Microsoft provides integration points that support at least four scenarios:

Using SharePoint portal search with CMS sites. SharePoint Portal Server offers Microsoft's most powerful web search technology, a vital asset for internal and external portal sites. MCMS lacks native search capability, and therefore wedding the two makes sense for many organizations. You can implement a SharePoint search and then add appropriate links in the MCMS templates to reach simple and advanced search capabilities.

Publishing WSS/SPS document libraries to CMS sites. SPS can augment CMS by providing document management capabilities by means of its document libraries. This functionality is similar to that offered in the connector between SPS 1.0 and CMS.

Publishing MCMS content within SPS sites. While SPS provides some rudimentary content management, you are likely to want to include rich content pages from MCMS within your SPS site.

Using MCMS authoring within SPS. Imagine that your public web site was implemented with MCMS and you have just implemented an intranet based on SharePoint Portal Server 2003. How do the twain meet? You can install web parts for MCMS in your intranet that connect to the content on your public web site. This step puts content management in a more visible place for users and integrates it with other line-of-business applications.

You may choose among these integration scenarios or implement features of more than one in your solution. Integration such as adding MCMS web parts to a SharePoint site does not really affect the underlying architecture of your CMS site, so the risk and impact are relatively low.