The Transformation of EndUserSharePoint.com: Blogs vs Publishing Pages
I had a conversation with Marcy Keller last night about the best way to expose the amount of content we have on EndUserSharePoint.com when migrating to SharePoint 2010. I hadn’t even thought of an alternative to using a blog, but she’s convinced me that a publishing site is a viable alternative.
We have about 10 authors posting content on a regular basis, so publishing pages give them the ability to come in and hammer out a new page pretty easily. There’s a built-in rating system which will be nice, too.
The main problem I have with the idea is how are people going to comment on the articles? There is no built-in comment system for publishing pages. I gave Jeremy Thake from SharePointDevWiki.com a quick poke and he said he’d check on alternatives.
I’m working on the idea of findability of content with the publishing pages by building a Content Type that will allow for segmentation of the data through search:
- User Level: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
- Topic Area: (Lots)
- Audience: Information Worker, Site Manager/Power User, Site Collection Administrator
- Platform: WSS, MOSS 2007, SP2010
- Etc (Suggestions?)
Also, there’s a basic problem with SharePoint blogs in that you can’t embed objects, so there goes the inline video and audio shows.
That’s just the quick ideas, but the more I think of it, the more I like publishing pages, as long as Jeremy gets the commenting system worked out.
Suggestions? Comments? Are we on the right track?
- The Transformation of EndUserSharePoint.com Begins
- The Transformation of EndUserSharePoint.com: The Page Layout Button
- The Transformation of EndUserSharePoint.com: Blogs vs Publishing Pages
Mark,
This is a good start, but I think there needs to a lot more metadata added. We need to look at how the article applies to SP. For example is it something that affects Lists, Libraries, Web Parts, or Templates. Then we need to drill down to within each of those as to which it affects. For example within lists we have Announcements, Contacts, Discussion Boards, links, etc. So I see two types of metadata fields needed here. I know that I would like to see all articles that use CEWP, or use the contacts list and see what solution people have applied to specific lists or web parts or templates, etc.
Also, Platform needs to be broken out for SP2010 to have the flavors it comes in.
Also, what about if the solution uses JavaScript, jQuery, Plugins, HTML, CSS, etc. Should we not tag for that as well.
Tag by Author.
What about articles that are part of a series, how do you plan to tag and organize those? It would be nice to be able to see all the articles in a series when you are in anyone of the articles in the series.
These are my initial thoughts. I will add more as they come to me.
Thanks Peter. Keep ‘em coming. You, of all people, should know how you want your articles accessed
— Mark
Mark,
While there might be the ability to embed video or audio natively it could be worked around using html pages, stored in a documnt library, with the video or audio embedded in them. We used that approach back in the dark days of SPS 2003 for providing training videos to our end user community and it worked pretty well.
There is always more than one way to skin the proverbial cat.
I’ve also actually done this by extending the Blog Post Site Template to add a new Site column for video, and then rendering this at the bottom of the post in the customised page layout.