Advanced Microsoft Content Management Server MCMS: Working with the Publishing API, Placeholders, Search, Web Services, RSS, and Sharepoint Integration (Paperback)

~ Lim Mei Ying (Author), Stefan Gosner (Author), Andrew Connell (Author), Angus Logan (Author)
Key Phrases: same virtual server, obj ect sender, map channel names, Web Author, Web Parts, Visual Studio (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This book has the most in depth-coverage of important MCMS development topics found anywhere. Each author of the book is a renowned expert in the area

• Learn directly from recognized community experts
• Extensive coverage of the Publishing API (PAPI)
• Get Sharepoint and MCMS working together
• InfoPath, RSS and hot topics covered

In Detail

Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 is a dynamic web publishing system with which you can build websites quickly and cost-efficiently. MCMS provides the administration, authoring, and data management functionality, and you provide the website interface, logic, and workflow. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) also features in the book. SPS 2003 enables enterprises to deploy an intelligent portal that seamlessly connects users, teams, and knowledge so that people can take advantage of relevant information across business processes to help them work more efficiently.

You've mastered the basics of MCMS, and setup your own MCMS installation. You've only scratched the surface. This book is your gateway to squeezing every penny from your investment in MCMS and SPS, and making these two applications work together to provide an outstanding richness of content delivery and easy maintainability.

As a developer, the Publishing API (PAPI) is at the heart of your work with MCMS, and this book starts by taking you on the most detailed tour of the PAPI you will find anywhere. As a live example, a component that reveals the structure of your MCMS site is created, taking you through how to manage the common elements of MCMS programmatically.

Getting SharePoint and MCMS to work together is the next stop in the book. You will see how to use SharePoint's search engine to search MCMS content, publish content between the two systems, and create SharePoint Web Parts to draw content from MCMS.

To ease your everyday work with MCMS, there are chapters on placeholder validation, and some useful custom placeholders for common MCMS tasks, such as a date-time picker, a placeholder for multiple attachments, and a DataGrid placeholder among others.

There are a number of ways to consume MCMS content from the outside world, and we look at two exciting ways here; RSS and InfoPath/Web Services. The InfoPath solution provides another interface to MCMS content that allows content authors to concentrate on content and not the presentation.

What you will learn from this book?

• Extensive coverage of the Publishing API (PAPI)
• Managing Channels and Postings with the PAPI
• Managing Templates, Template Galleries, Resources, and Users with the PAPI
• Getting Sharepoint and MCMS to work together
• Publishing content between MCMS and SharePoint
• Preparing postings for search indexing
• Creating Sharepoint Web Parts to display MCMS data
• Creating powerful custom Placeholder Controls
• Adding validation to Placeholder Controls
• Combining InfoPath, Web Services and MCMS's robust content repository
• Using RSS to syndicate content from your site, and display content from other sites
• Staging static versions of your pages
• A further 60 pages of invaluable MCMS tips and tricks

Who this book is written for?

This book is written for developers who want to the skills to fully exploit the power of MCMS and SPS. The book presumes a working knowledge of MCMS, the .NET Framework and familiarity with the C# language. All the code examples are in C#.

From the Publisher

Following on from "Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server", this book takes MCMS development to a higher level of both power and integration. Like its predecessor, this book is packed with code examples and never-before seen secrets of MCMS. Years of active participation in MCMS newsgroups and mailing lists mean that the authors hard-won experience puts them in the ideal position to tell you what you really need to know as you build more advanced MCMS applications.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (November 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1904811531
• ISBN-13: 978-1904811534
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #965,892 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #19 in

  Books > Computers & Internet > Web Development > Content Management

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'Must Have' MCMS Guide, June 18, 2006

By	David Adamson (Qld, Australia) - See all my reviews

If you've ever been involved with MCMS 2002, you will know the authors of this title, and the great work they do for the Content Management Server community. They are either Microsoft employees or MVPs and are recognised experts in CMS development.

This book is next in line after the title, "Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server". It delves deep into the more advanced development topics on the MCMS platform. To help you understand the topics and areas presented, there is an abundance of code which is essential. The best thing about the code examples is that they are not throw away HelloWorld demonstrations, but real life applications and uses of functionality that you will more than likely adapt to use in your own implementation. That's where the experience of the authors shines through.

As well as pure MCMS content, there are also a number of chapters dedicated to explaining and demonstrating Sharepoint integration points and searching (a major feature lacking from MCMS). For many company intranets, MCMS or Sharepoint are not enough on their own and must be combined to provide a complete solution. This book goes some way towards making the combination less painful.

My only (selfish) criticism of this book is the timing of its release. It would have been an awesome training tool when I was getting into MCMS development!! That aside, the examples given are still very relevant for development today and will offer even the seasoned developer new tricks, give them a deeper understanding of the APIs, and provoke new ideas and thoughts on what can be achieved. Chapters on RSS enabling your sites and integrating Infopath forms to web services in MCMS are two areas that probably wouldn't have been covered a few years ago, but are now hot topics.

The book also includes a number of "essential how-tos, tips and tricks" that are obviously taken from the authors' own experiences with MCMS customers. You too will have wondered how to do these things, and if you worked it out alone, would be cursing not having had this book in your collection at the time.

I consider this book, along with its predecessor, `must have' guides with material for anybody involved in MCMS development. You will definitely get a lot out of them.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very useful book, June 6, 2006

By	Joe Capka "Joe" (Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This book offers a hands-on approach to learning MCMS topics that mimic real world problems. While most books and manuals focus on the ideal or typical scenario, this book explores how to deal with the tough scenarios where the product shortcomings need to be overcome by creative and innovative solutions. Definitive answers are provided to many of the tough questions that every developer asks when delving deep into MCMS. Working code samples make up a significant portion of the book and are extremely valuable in understanding the topics being explained.

A few chapters of the book focus on the integration of MCMS and SharePoint technologies which while being a failry popular topic in industry is not something that has been well documented until now. Integration of MCMS with SharePoint or RSS is viewed as a difficult task but has now been made significantly easier.

This book is meant for developers that want to push MCMS past the typical scenario and get the most out of the product. It is not meant to teach MCMS but to help developers familiar with the product to get to the next level of expertise.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid Book , June 5, 2006

By	Derek Strickland "Application Architect" (Clearwater, FL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book starts out strong with 3 chapters fully devoted to creating a sample application using the Publishing API. While the code examples are copious they are (necessarily) somewhat redundant. The authors chose to create an administration tool as the most effective means of illustrating the Publishing API's capability. This was an effective technique in that it exposed the core of the API very quickly to the reader, as well as having the added benefit of communicating the purpose of the MCMS Server. If you are uncertain, as I was, on what problems Microsoft Content Management Server may or may not be the right solution for, this book will take you a long way towards understanding the product and its role in the platform.

After finishing the baseline administration tool, the book takes a refreshing detour on the topic of search engines. Rather than going into detail I will summarize this chapter by saying this, if you need a primer on the basics of Search Engine Optimization, give this chapter a shot. I think you will like it.

Next, the authors spend three chapters on SharePoint integration and configuration. If you are using SharePoint as a foundation for your product or the enabling technology for your internal portal, you should consider the benefits of integrating with MCMS or possibly using MCMS in lieu of SharePoint. My experiences with SharePoint have always reminded me of the end of a brewery tour; fraught with bloat. While SharePoint is remarkably feature-rich, it always seems that the average user either isn't interested in the features or is intimidated by them. The appealing aspect of MCMS, from my perspective, is that the Publishing API is designed to allow you to write your applications/sites your way (with some caveats), and still have the added benefit of a tool that handles the administrative duties (transactional document management). I quickly got the feeling that if my singular goal was to manage web content across any number of channels then MCMS was a nice lightweight alternative to SharePoint. In fact, I kept thinking about website design firms and wondering how a product like this could impact the efficiency of their business.

The refreshing thing to learn, for me at least, was that while MCMS can and does integrate with SharePoint, SharePoint is not required. In fact the book does a fine job of illustrating how to avoid using SharePoint altogether.

With SharePoint fully dealt with, the book moves on from that point to discuss the intricacies of the aforementioned caveats of implementing dynamic content, validating dynamic content, and staging static content as well. Also of note are chapters devoted to integrating InfoPath as an editing tool and integrating RSS feeds into yours site, all with full code samples.

All in all, this book was enjoyable. With the exception of the unavoidable SharePoint section, the book was devoted to MCMS development and as such had a lot of example code to sift through. As a testament to this book, I think you could read the code examples alone and get an introduction to the Publishing API. One disclaimer, the example applications in this book are intentionally straight forward. All the sample code is procedural in nature. Take it for what it is, a readable set of examples. This book is not intended to address issues of application design, and if you expect that you will be sorely disappointed.