If you missed the first part in this article series please read What's new in Sharepoint 2007 - Part I.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

When it comes to work with the content,  today's enterprises have broad  needs and extensive requirements  , starting from  authoring and publishing of content to thefeatures like applying policies to content , auditing , perform archival tasks, watermarking , bar-coding ,versioning , workflow , etc.  Above all these the issues arises wheninformation is present in various formats (e.g. Pdf , word 2002/2003/2007 ,InfoPath form) but still need to be persisted and presented uniformly. MOSSprovides excellent features to carter this wide range of requirements, for easeof understanding we can divide these into two broad categories namely RecordManagement and Web Content Management.

Web Content Management 

MOSSprovides authoring and publishing facility from both web based and clientinterfaces (with number of limitations). As for Web Base Authoring, authors arepresented with a Page (or alternatively you can design your own Pages, known asPage Layouts) contains field controls (can think of them as a web controls). Byentering content into the page via field controls you will generate a page fullof information. For a quick example think of this procedure, as you have a MSWord template and document(s) create basis of these template. Figure 2.1a showsa page in edit mode and Figure 2.1b show the published page, the page uses MOSSout of box page layout called "Article Page" 

 



























Figure 2.1a

Figure 2.1b

MOSS supports versioning for pages, andauthors can always revert back to the previous versions if necessary. Now forthose who are wondering where the pages actually got stored, the pages aresaved in the page library (like document library) but all the content residepage resides in the content data base. Don't worry if you don't able to absorbit right now, we will take a detail look at complete architecture of pageauthoring and publishing in future articles for now its fine to know that datais separated from its presentation, moreover for developers this means it'spossible to get the data out of a page through MOSS object model.

Record Management 
 
MOSS provides out of box support forimplementing policies, performing archival, labeling, auditing, automatic barcodes generation (see figure 2.2.2 ) through what is known as "Information ManagementPolicy". For a quick analogy you can think of policies as something like a ruledefine on a folder in windows. Let's say that you have a folder where you storeall your payroll related documents on month basis, and you want them to bearchived, labeled and audited. Polices in MOSS are defined on a List or aDocument Libraries (don't worry if you don't know them yet, just think of themas a folder in windows where you can store content/document, for developersit's better to think of them as a table in data base with rows and columns)level thus made is very easy for administration to manage and for architect toplan them out.  Though water marking ofdocuments is not provided by MOSS out of the box, but this can be achievedthrough programming. This is something we will cover in later articles when weprovide details on how to manage and customize policies through codes. 

Fate of MCMS 2002 

For those who are coming from MicrosoftContent Management Server (MCMS) 2002 background must be wondering about itsfate, the simple answer is that it's not more and there will be no futurereleases of it either. Actually with MOSS you don't need MCMS 2002 as all the major functionalities of MCMS withsome great additions are now available in MOSS.MCMS 2002 definitely lacks trueintegration with SharePoint 2003 and experience is as best define as limited ,moreover some most important features e.g. Search is  totally absent. Thoughit's hard to pin point why there is so much gap but this might be due to thefact that MCMS 2002 was not originally developed but Microsoft and hence nevermeant to be integrated with other Microsoft products and technologies.  From the development prospective MCMS 2002really requires developers to learn new set of API's and hence greater learningcurve was required. The fact is MOSS content management features are writtenfrom scrap and from looking at object model its quite evident that there itscompletely new and freshly baked .

There is one important point to note and that isthe migration of content from MCMS 2002 to MOSS 2007, and this though dependson many factors but mostly requires substantial effort. For both Administrationand Development point of view proper planning and site designing must be donebefore proceeding towards migration. The good news is as Microsoft will supportMCMS till year 2014, organizations do not need to hurry while making plansregarding migration and/or upgrade to MOSS (just to make things more interestingcontrast this, with case of Window XP where Microsoft will end their mainstreamsupport for it in April 2009!) 

What's next 

In the next article, we will take a look athow MOSS provides features like, Portal, Business Process and BusinessIntelligence. Business Process and Business Intelligence are two new welcomeadditions to MOSS current release, and they offer huge potential if usedproperly. Its good time to point out that ,Microsoft deliberately drop the term"Portal" from name of SharePoint Server 2007. The main reason is that, asMicrosoft is adding new features to the product offering, SharePoint as aproduct has much more than just as of Portalfunctionality.

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