Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

Chapter 17. Content Deployment

Content deployment is one of the key feature areas from Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) 2002 that has been brought over to and extended within Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 to enable flexible, powerful, fast, efficient, and secure deployment of Publishing sites. In a nutshell, content deployment is the copying of content from one site collection to another, either within the same SharePoint farm or across farms. The most common scenario that content deployment targets is that of enabling content authoring within the internal network (a read/write environment) and content delivery to the Internet (a read-only environment). Once configured by an administrator, content deployment can take place without any manual intervention.

While the main application of content deployment is for Internet-facing sites, it is an extremely flexible feature that can also be used with intranet sites and for deploying content across site collections on a single machine running MOSS. More complex uses include a three-tier deployment topology (authoring, staging, and production).

While MOSS provides a comprehensive administrative user interface for configuring, running, and monitoring content deployment, it also provides an API that enables developers to customize deployments to suit specific needs, such as deployment across disconnected environments.

Content deployment also features a capability called Quick Deploy that enables content authors to deploy ...