I've been putting together some presentations on WCM and the functionality that SharePoint provides. So below I've walked thru the key areas within the Publishing sites available in MOSS 2007. I've tried to highlight where it falls short on other WCM products in terms of functionality on the way through also.

Above is a screen shot of a out of the box Publishing site. You can see the Page Tool bar below the Top Navigation. This Page tool bar is used to control the Page content in terms of workflow, publishing and saving contents etc. Creating a new page is done from the Site Actions | Create Page option.

The above Page menu shows the functionality provided out of the box that can be extended for particular scenarios. You will see similar features to a List Item available here such as Check In... and Delete etc.

Spell Checker

The out of the box spell checker will check the spelling on the content on the entire page and does not do it at a editable content area level like a lot of other WCM products out there. The interface will be familiar to Microsoft Office users although it does not highlight the underlying content with in the page. This can be added with the use of components such as the RAD Editor by Telerik.

Asset Management

Any images that are used in a Page are stored in a Image Library, one is created by default for you and you have the option to Upload new images and then select them from this page. There are definitely issues here in terms of how untidy this gets over time and standards will need to be put in place to control this. It would be nice if it automatically stored images in folders relevant to the posts to keep this library tidy. MOSS 2007 does provide a "Site Collection Images" Library where you can store images that are reused across various pages. Out of the box you'll need to do some work to make this tidy as if 20 authors get at this over 3 months they'll be no easy way of re-using content other than to flick through all the thumbnails.

You can extend the Meta Data capabilities by adding columns to the library e.g. the Description column.

Clicking on the upload button from the Asset picker will allow you to browse for an image. If you have a new image with the same name it will also overwrite the existing version in the library if you chose to.

Clicking OK will then check if there are any required columns for the Image Library item and will prompt you to enter them e.g. for Description. This will allow you to make finding images easier for reuse, although to be honest there is no Search functionality within this screen which makes it a bit pointless at this stage!

Image Management

You can also control the Image HTML rendering with these out of the box properties and apply hyperlinks and ALT tags etc. One thing that a lot of other WCM Vendor products do is actually control re-rendering images on the fly based on the Size you specify, but this seems to just modify the HTML tags and therefore will keep the original size of the image as apposed to the size specified slowing page download speeds down.

Page Templates

When creating a new page it will also provide you with options with regards to what Page Template you use. There are various page templates out of the box which are useful and are easily made as they are all based on Master Pages within the ASP.NET Framework.

These page templates map to Content Types as shown above.

It will only show Page Templates that will map to the underlying Pages Document Library Content Types and in the Settings for that library you can see what Templates use each column. You can make these columns as specific as you like or as broad as you like depending on the structure of the web site. An example would be a product pages where various products could use different templates, but have the same underlying data.

Page Ownership

There is also a concept of page Ownership which by default is whoever initially creates the Page, but can be changed at a later date. One drawback here is that there does not appear to be any option to change in bulk the owner for instance if a person changes roles or leaves the company so  this does have some long time management issues.

Editing Content

The above screen shot is just to illustrate that if a page is checked out to another user you cannot edit that page and the options are greyed out.

The user is required to click Check In to Share Draft to enable other users to edit this Page.

Page Editing Zones

Rich Text Editor

The built-in text edit has varoius options as discussed in previous posts including selecting styles etc as below.

Built-in Styles

Preview

The preview option allows you to see the end rendered page which is what the page will look like by a Visitor to the web site. This is always handy to remove the clutter of administration links etc. to get a better view for how the content flows.