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

3.1. Web Content Management on the Microsoft Platform

Prior to MOSS, Microsoft had separate, distinct offerings for WCM, portal content aggregation, and search. The WCM offering came in the form of Content Management Server 2002 (MCMS). MCMS provided traditional WCM functionality such as a templated page model, in-context content authoring, and dynamic runtime compilation. MCMS provided a .NET-accessible Publishing API and ASP.NET integration, which enabled developers to build solutions on this framework. While certainly a successful product in its own right, the architecture of MCMS was very different from SharePoint and often constrained solutions development. Many organizations felt they had to choose between the previous versions of SharePoint and MCMS when embarking on a Web site project, and many chose to implement both with loose integration between them. Possibly the most common example of such integration was that of a WSS document library being used for document collaboration and versioning "inside the firewall," with the result made accessible via the public Web site hosted on MCMS. Unfortunately, there were core architectural differences between SharePoint and MCMS.

For example, MCMS did not embrace Internet Information Server 6.0's (IIS) worker process isolation mode and did not expose its security API to developers. Various SharePoint integration scenarios were provided for by an add-on connector ("Spark"), but it was clear that this bolt-on to bridge the architecture ...