Chapter 9: Web Content Management | Software Testing Fundamentals: Methods and Metrics

SharePoint 2007 is full of interesting and powerful features, as you have seen in the previous chapters. The administrator has full control over the SharePoint environment, while at the same time users have more power than ever to organize, share, and search for all types of content, such as news, documents and electronic forms. Still there is one very important feature that has only been covered partially in this book so far and that is how to manage the content itself. This chapter will discuss this matter in much greater detail and will help you understand how get the most out of SharePoint's content management features.

This chapter will cover MOSS web content management functionality. This is a very important chapter, since the features discussed here are among those most demanded by the users - and we must never forget that the reason we deploy SharePoint 2007 in the first place is to build a solution that will empower our users. This chapter will also compare the content management functionality between SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007, which will help you find arguments you may need to gain approval to upgrade to the newest version of SharePoint.

Introduction to Content Management

The term content management (CM) is very broad, and means different things to different people, but the general meaning is a technical process that supports the management of digital information, during its life cycle. Very often when people talk about content management they mean either or both document management and web content management, and this is also what this chapter will focus on. The type of digital information that is the target for content management is anything that requires some management during its life span, that is, any information that you want to keep for a while, for example:

q Standard files: text files, configuration files, source code, and files created with any type of application, including non-Microsoft applications, such as desktop publishing files, and computer-aided design (CAD) files.
q Multimedia files: Music and audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), image files (e.g., JPG, GIF, PNG), and video files (e.g., AVI, MPEG).
q Document files: Files created by MS Word, MS Excel, MS OneNote, MS InfoPath, and similar applications.
q Web content files: Files, or pages, displayed on a web page, typically an intranet or public web site.

One goal of content management is to make it easier for users to add, update, and delete these types of files. This in turn will make it easier for the users to organize, find, and control how these files are used, during the file's life cycle. The management process can be divided into the following steps:

Create: For example, when a new MS Word file is created.
Update: For example, when editing an MS Word file.
Publish: When a file is made available to other users.
Archive: For example, when a published file is replaced by a newer version, but you want to keep it in case it will be needed.
Retire: When the file is removed or deleted.

Exactly who will be responsible for which process step depends on the type of file content and on the organization. In small companies, the same person may be responsible for all steps, but in larger organizations it is usually different people for different steps. The roles for the content management process are usually described as:

q Content Author: The user that creates and edits the file; for example, the MS Word document.
q Editor: The user that is responsible for the content itself, for example a user who approves the content, and its looks, and possibly also localizations and translations.
q Publisher: The user who will be responsible for making this file available to other users; for example, a news item presented on an intranet.
q Administrator: The user who is responsible for managing permissions for the content; for example, permissions to the MS Word files and the folders they are stored in.
q Consumer: The user who consumes (views and possibly copies) the content.

These roles relate directly to what SharePoint groups can do, so it will be easy to implement a role-based content management process. SharePoint also supports the technical requirements necessary to implement the content management process. The rest of this chapter will describe how to handle content management in SharePoint 2007.

Why Use Content Management?

The simple answer is: to have control over the content. A more elaborate answer is that content management helps organizations to keep track of all their digital information, such as documents, files, and web content. The more people who consume this digital information, the more important content management becomes. If you are working alone, chances are that you will do fine without content management, although it can help you organize your files in better ways.

Some of the more common challenges of working with digital information without a content management system are:

q No version control: It is hard at times to be 100 percent sure that the file you are using is the latest version; to be sure, you may have to look in multiple locations to see if there are any other versions of this file.
q No checkout/checkin: When you need to update a publicly available document or web content, you will most likely copy that information to your local computer, then update its content, and then publish it again. This process cannot prevent another user, unaware of your activity, from updating the same content, so you will have a conflict about which update should be published.
q No approval: When the author is satisfied with the content, he or she will publish it directly. There is no support for demanding that another person must approve the update before it is published.
q No workflows: You cannot define a process that triggers on new or updated content. For example when a document's status is changed from Preliminary to Completed, you may want to copy this document to the intranet.
q No policies: There is no way to say what will happen with a web page or MS Word file during its lifetime. You cannot define a process that will delete a specific document after five years.

Still there are only a few organizations today that have active content management implemented, so obviously you can do without it. Or can you? You can answer this, yourself - just look at how the digital information is managed in your organization. You spend a lot of time making sure that you find the right document and the latest version. You also manually copy documents to the intranet, when necessary, and to be honest: Haven't there been times when you missed something? Of course, you need content management; we all do!

Important CMS Features

The list in the previous section about what you will miss without content management is at the same time a list of what must be included in a content management system - and you need even more. Below is a wish list of features and concepts that a good content management system should have:

q Metadata: Today, filenames and folders are the only way to describe and organize files and documents. A content management system must allow the user to add properties, also known as metadata, to files and other types of content. This metadata should also be searchable, and able to be used to sort and organize this content.
q Version history: Whenever content such as a web page or an MS Word document is updated, the previous version should be preserved. This will ensure that you can revert to a previous version, if necessary. You can also see how this content has evolved over time, and what users have updated this content.
q Checkout/checkin: It must be possible to update publicly available content, without needing to copy the content to another location. To allow a user to update content, without affecting what the consumers (the users with read access) can see, the system must create two copies of the same content: one for the consumers (the latest published version) and one for the content's author. The system must also prohibit another content author from editing the same content, to avoid creating conflicting versions; this is exactly what the Check Out process does. When the content author is done updating the content, this new version will now replace the public content, and this is what Check In does.
q Approval: Before updated content becomes public, it sometimes must be approved by a person other than the content's author. For example, when you add a news item to the intranet, your manager must approve its content before it goes public. The system must notify the approver that there is something to approve, typically by e-mail.
q Workflows: When content or its metadata is updated, you sometimes need to start an activity or a process. For example, every time a new customer is added to a customer list, the sales team should be informed. Another example is that when the metadata "In Stock" for a product list falls below a specific value; a purchase order should automatically be sent to the vendor of that product. These are typical things you can do with workflows: They can trigger a preconfigured process when something happens, such as when a new document is added, or when the document or any of its metadata is updated. A workflow can also be started manually. A typical example is when a content author wants to send an e-mail with requests for comments to her colleagues about an updated document.
q Localizations: For web content on intranet and public Internet sites, it is sometimes very important that the content can be localized, depending on the person looking at the web page (i.e., a German user should see the information in German, while a Swedish user should see it in Swedish).
q Policies: Policies define what will happen to content, such as a web page or a document, during its lifetime. For example, every time a document is printed, it can automatically have the text "Only for internal use!" added to it. Another policy example is that all actions regarding a document could be audited, such as when somebody reads, copies, or modifies it. A third policy example is that after a specific time something happens to the content, such as archiving, deleting, or changing metadata.

If your system has support for just some of these features, then it will help your organization to manage your content better. And MS Office SharePoint Server 2007 has support for all of these, and more. For example, to make it easier for an editor or a content author to discover modified or new content pages, news items, or any type of list content, SharePoint lets a user define alerts. This will instruct SharePoint to send an e-mail to the user whenever the content is added, deleted, or modified. Following is an example of how to set up an alert for all changes to the News items list; the result is that any time there is a change to this list, an e-mail is sent to this user.

Try It Out Create an Alert for News Items

Log on as a user with at least permissions to read news items (for example, as a member of the SharePoint group <Site_Name> Visitors).
Open the News tab on the intranet portal.
Click View All Site Content in the Quick Launch bar, then click Pages. This is the list that stores all news items by default.
Click Actions Alert Me to open the configuration page for the alert.
1. Alert Title: News Items.
2. Send Alerts To: Enter the recipient's name. By default the user's name will be listed. It is also possible to add more names or distribution groups here.
3. Change Type: Select the type of change that will trigger this alert.
4. Send Alerts for These Changes: This is an optional filter; for example, you could filter the alerts to trigger only when somebody else is modifying a news item you created.
5. When to Send Alerts: Select how often SharePoint will look for these changes: Immediately, Daily, or Weekly. Note that "Immediately" means every five minutes by default. This value can be set with the STSADM tool.
6. Click OK to save and close this alert.

The Alert feature is available in all lists and libraries in SharePoint. You can use it on complete lists, individual documents, or list items. It is a great feature, so make sure to take advantage of it.