Comparison of MOSS 2007 WCM and MCMS 2002

This is the first post in the serial that I will write for the content management piece in Office Sharepoint Server 2007. I will try to compare the difference between the WCM of Sharepoint 2007 and the current MCMS 2002.

As you may already knew that Microsoft discarded its Content Management product line and make its new Sharepoint product as the content management platform. Almost all MCMS elements and terms that current MCMS developers familiar with are changed. To make me learn the new things easier, I did a comparison in following list:

	MCMS 2002	Sharepoint 2007
Development Tools	Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005	Visual Studio 2005, Sharepoint Designer
Framework	.NET 1.1, .NET 2.0	.Net 2.0
Master file	Supported in SP2 and developed by VS 2005. The master file stays in the virtual directory of web server.	Master file can be created by Sharepoint Designer and VS 2005. But the master file is a ghost page need to be uploaded via Sharepoint admin page.
Template	CMS Template. It’s stored in template gallery. It contains list of placeholders, list of custom properties and links to a template page (aspx file)	Content Type. Content Type contains a list of columns.
Template page	An aspx page stays on file system.	Page Layout. Created based on the Content Type. Aspx file but stays on Sharepoint server, it’s editable by Sharepoint Designer and VS 2005.
Content place holder	Placeholder. CMS has some build-in placeholders such as html placeholder, xml placeholder, image placeholder and attachment placeholder	Column / Filed. Sharepoint 2007 has more types like single line text, numeric, date, time, currency, html, picture, attachment file… I couldn’t find the xml type which is very useful in current MCMS 2002. But there are a lot other useful column types like lookup, business data …
Place holder control	The build-in placeholder web control used in template aspx page for content editing in authoring mode and content rendering in publishing mode is in Microsoft.ContentManagement. Publishing.Extension.Placholders You are also be able to create your own custom web controls.	Sharepoint 2007 also has many web controls for content editing and rendering. They are in Microsoft. Sharepoint.Publishing. Those controls are automatically added to the page layout aspx when drag the fields in Sharepoint Designer. I believed you are able to create the custom controls and add to your own page as well.
Page	Posting. Posting will be able to be created and managed in web interface. The posting is stored in CMS database.	Page. Page can be created in Sharepoint admin web UI based on the selected page layout. You are able to use Sharpoint designer to unghost (customize) the page.
Folder	Channel. It’s just a simple container contains a set of postings.	Site. It should be an WSS site including a set of lists, doc libraries and other contents.
Resource	Resource gallery. No versioning support	Document library, picture library … support versioning
Publishing workflow	Build-in workflow. No alert, hard to customize	Based on Windows workflow framework, very flexible.
Security	Windows AD account only. Only control to channel level	Can control to page level, support AD account, LDAP, and database.
Versions	Simple	Very good

Sharepoint 2007 also includes other benefits which you couldn’t find in MCMS 2002 out-of-box. For example: the out-of-box navigation bar support, search functions, personalization and user profiles…