With public facing or large intranet sites it is common for organizations to stage content before it is made available to the end users. This allows for collaboration and testing of content before it is made available in the production sites. For instance, an e-commerce site might perform weeks of testing site changes before making those changes available to public users.

Introduced in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, the content deployment features allow authoring content in one site collection and then deploying the content of the site collection to another. The target site collection can be on the same SharePoint farm or an entirely different SharePoint farm. SharePoint also allows chains of content deployment. For instance, the content could be authored in a site collection that is deployed to a staging environment. Once the content has been tested and approved, it is then deployed from the staging environment to the production environment.

In this chapter, we will...