A while ago I created a deep dive article series covering the WSS content deployment and migration API which helped many people to develop their own applications to do export and import in a customized manner.
Today I will start a new article series which will discuss all aspects of Content Deployment – with other words the MOSS feature sitting on top of the WSS API.
Most customers see this feature as a monolithic implementation which does not allow any customization – but that is not the case as you will see in future chapters of this article series
But before we can start with the internals we first have to start with the basics.
Content Deployment – The Idea Behind
MOSS 2007 contains Content Deployment as a new feature which has been added to fulfill the requirements of companies which plan to use SharePoint as a Web server to host public facing Web sites.
The main purpose is to allow authors and reviewers to modify and evaluate on a different farm before the content is finally pushed to the public facing server farm – but also to have a single authoring environment and then push the content to multiple different farms of different departments - potentially on different continents.
A similar concept (site deployment) was already available in Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 but required additional programming for automated deployments. With MOSS 2007 this can now be automated and customized easily through a build in UI.
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