You probably already have a live website running, or at least, are planning to start one. Take this simple test to find if your website would benefit from a content management tool:
Would you like your website to have a consistent look and feel throughout?
Would you benefit from being able to apply a new look and feel to the website without reloading all of your information?
Do you wish you could share content across pages without duplicating it all over the place?
Do you want to avoid getting feedback from users about incorrect information posted online?
Would you like to be able to pull out all pages that meet certain criteria, such as being newly created in the last 10 days?
Would you like to give your content authors a simple, user-friendly interface to create web content with?
Do you need to find out exactly where in the publishing process a page could be at any point in time?
If you answered 'yes' to any of the above questions, your website could benefit from a content management application. Microsoft Content Management Server is one of the most comprehensive applications on the market providing you with a ready-to-use publishing solution.
Like many packaged solutions, MCMS has been marketed to various organizations in different ways giving you different ideas about how this product could fit into your organization. If you are evaluating the software, you may be required to provide an analysis of what the product can and cannot do. And if you have already purchased it, your boss is likely to ask you to provide solutions to real problems, and fast. Before you begin, it's important that you get a good idea of what MCMS really is.
In this chapter, we provide you with a quick overview of what MCMS is all about. We also explain some core concepts behind the inner workings of the Server. In the coming chapters, we will examine how MCMS works in greater detail.
The dot-com boom years saw many companies creating a presence on the Internet. Product brochures, company profiles, quarterly reports, and organizational charts found their way from filing cabinets and wall charts to web pages.
Who did all that work? A team of technical people in every organization was responsible for cranking out web pages as fast as their fingers could type and they gained the name of webmasters. It was a job that was popular when the Internet started. Webmasters were the resident gurus in hacking out scripts and HTML: in fact these skills are often prerequisites for the position.
As websites grew in importance and size, it came to the point where a single webmaster (or even a team of webmasters) was not able to cope with the large volume of information that needed to make its way online.
Content started to become unmanageable. While a single team of webmasters could manage the website in its infant stages, it was clear that either processes had to be changed or super-webmasters would have to be recruited to keep the site going as it grew.
Frustrated with being at the mercy of overworked webmasters, some content providers or authors took up the task of trying to publish their own content online. Without a proper content management system, this usually meant that authors had to take on the role of the webmaster and learn the dark art of web publishing. They went through boot camps that taught them how to use various web editing tools. Most authors did not have programming backgrounds. It was often a hair-tearing, time-consuming and difficult process.