Conclusion

Nearly every portal needs content management; and the implementation of content management along with related page migration consumes a significant amount of time and labor, at least for large sites. Content management ultimately offers one of the strongest returns on investment for portal technology, as it places control over content in the hands of those who truly own it, freeing up webmasters, HTML programmers, and developers to turn their attention to more challenging tasks than coding static web pages.

The Microsoft .NET platform offers several content management options. SharePoint includes content management along with collaboration, a search engine, and document management. For most large portal sites, you need more content management than SharePoint alone can deliver. Including MCMS gives you tremendous control over the appearance of your web pages and supports a collaborative authoring environment so you can easily add new content and keep existing content fresh. The extensibility of the product along with its melding into the Visual Studio.NET integrated development environment means that you can build a significant amount of your portal solution in MCMS.

By starting with the taxonomy and the templates for static web pages, you can create a basis on which to hang not only static web content but the other applications that make your portal rich in functionality. Chapter 10 provides more detail on how to develop the taxonomy and make it concrete.