D
on’t read this!
Don’t read this first, anyway. Start anywhere in the book and just read
what you need! Read this only if you want to know why we did or didn’t do
something later in the text.
What is this book about? This book is about the tasks required to con-
figure and operate a Web site based on Microsoft Content Management Server
2002. When we say this book is about creating a Web site, we’re talking about
a content-rich site that supports a specific business need—and the attendant
community of workers—with a cogent interface. According to Microsoft, such
a site is termed a portal. Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) is
part of Microsoft’s integrated portal technologies, that is, products providing
a comprehensive Web Services framework.
What is Content Management Server? MCMS enables companies to
rapidly develop, deploy, and maintain content-rich, highly volatile Web
sites. An MCMS site is actually a site within a site—one site faces the world
and its shadow image provides access to users whose job is to contribute
content to the site. MCMS provides tools to implement and administer both
the production and development environments.
The MCMS content-management strategy hinges upon empowering a
community of workers to author content, schedule updates, and administer
a site, on its own—all while maintaining consistent quality and accessibility.
MCMS provides tools for organizing and automating dynamic content deliv-
ery. In fact, MCMS allows an organization to define specific roles (author,
editor, approver, administrator, and so on), assign them to various users, and
automate each user’s experience with data views and tools based on the user’s
job role. You might say that all this can be done with scripted Web pages, so
where’s the big value? Efficiency. MCMS abstracts Web content from markup
language (HTML) by providing a behind-the-scenes page-rendering frame-
work. With this approach, the same content is easily repurposed, filtered, and
personalized programmatically, using tools and components provided by

the load on an overworked IT department, but the means is to personalize
each user’s experience.
The Big Picture: Portals
A portal is a Web site that aggregates contextually relevant information and
services. In short, a portal distills knowledge from data. The right portal
transforms how and how effectively a corporation conducts its business.
Why portals? Portals allow multiple layers of security. Content resources are
abstracted from page markup. User roles restrict general access. Portals pro-
vide a mechanism that supports personalization. Personalization is blended
from a mix of UI preferences and programmatic rules. Portals facilitate appli-
cation integration by interconnecting systems through data sharing and
automated transactions. Portals allow information workers to create content
once, reuse that content, and gather content from disparate sources to dis-
play within a single interface.
A CMS portal automates content approval and publication. CMS enables
knowledge workers to combine efforts—synchronously and asynchronously
through meeting spaces, project sites, automated workflow, document check-
in/checkout, IM, polls, subscriptions, and alerts.
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INTRODUCTIONxvi
According to Microsoft, portals are increasingly more common. Creating
and maintaining a portal, however, represents a substantial technical chal-
lenge, which is why Microsoft released its integrated portal technologies (MIPT).
MIPT is a group of common architectural elements that provide a comprehen-
sive framework to meet business needs. Microsoft products and platforms
address portal requirements through a layered architecture, provided by Micro-
soft Server 2003 and SQL Server. On top of the platform layer comes the Web
application platform: developer tools and a rendering/application-integration
framework. The Web application and base layers combined provide a platform
on which any Web service can be built.

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INTRODUCTION xvii
really outside the scope of this book. Just understand that for many enterprise
installations where MCMS shines its brightest, the production environment is
a server farm, with multiple firewalls, load balancing, failover clustering, and
all those other exotic—and expensive—technologies to serve thousands of
users and hundreds of concurrent transactions.
Even if your solution doesn’t approach that kind of scale, there are plenty
of wrinkles you’ll need to deal with. Remember an MCMS site is actually a site
within a site. There is the site where pages are assembled for denizens of
Internet-land to view and there is the site where contributors post content.
Further, an MCMS site is dynamic in nature. Page templates contain place-
holders for content elements that are extracted either from a database or
cache and merged with the templates, and then the entire object is then ren-
dered to the viewer as markup—HTML. In some instances, many relating to
non-Microsoft servers, a dynamic site is not an option. MCMS provides a solu-
tion to this by allowing the dynamic site to be staged as a static site containing
HTML-based pages only (no placeholders to resolve). Read-only sites can be
implemented as dynamic or static. Read/write can only be implemented as
dynamic; content has to flow bidirectionally—to and from the Content Reposi-
tory database. Replication must be managed for all the sites in any
environment consisting of multiple servers.
Before you undertake the creation of a Web site, we strongly recommend
that you write a specification, even if it’s just on paper. This, however, is not
part of the scope of this book. Neither is running the setup program for the
MCMS.
We hope this book serves you as a handy job aid. Unlike most large
computer books that contain a lot of information of questionable value to
a working professional, this book is small and the writing is sparse in an
effort to just provide the operational details that you need to get things