SharePoint 2013 Web Content Management Series Introduction
I haven't been very active this past year on my blog site, and it hasn't been for a lack of topics. The last twelve months have been a whirlwind. I first got the beta bits for SharePoint 2013 at the MVP Summit in February 2012, and I've spent a lot of the last 12 months getting up to speed on all the changes and new features. I have to say I'm very excited about 2013. One of the comments I heard from Microsoft was they made a much bigger investment in ECM in the 2010 release, and this time in 2013 that switched to focusing on WCM. That along with the recent pricing changes that have made SharePoint much more affordable for public web sites should open a wealth of opportunities to develop sites on SharePoint 2013.
During the last year we've updated all of our products to run on SharePoint 2013, converted our Envision IT site, internal collaboration site, and my blog site to 2013, and delivered a lot of talks and webinars on SharePoint 2013. You can see much of this on our Envision IT site at www.envisionit.com. Now it's time to start getting that knowledge organized so both our staff at Envision IT and the community in general can leverage it.
To that end I've started fleshing out the structure for a series on WCM in SharePoint 2013. My original goal was to author this as a book, but the reality of running a business, speaking broadly, and still having some personal life has tempered that. Instead I'm going to start by building it as a series of blog posts linked together as a series. This may eventually end up as a book, but we'll leave that as a stretch goal. I'm also going to be asking my team at Envision IT and the community in general to contribute their ideas as well as take ownership on some of the topics.
In order to make this more real, we're going to be building a full project from start to finish, and sharing the elements as we go on this site. I actually had this idea over six years ago, and started a sample project based on Shakespeare's collected works. I feel it works well since the content is all in the public domain, and there is an obvious metadata structure around the content. We're planning on rolling this into the fictitious Envision Shakespeare Company, and building a fully functional SharePoint 2013 public web site around this. For the project background please see the Envision Shakespeare Company post.
The topics listed may not get authored in the order they are listed. Depending on what areas are the most fleshed out, and where the needs are internally to support client projects, they may get fleshed out in a seemingly random order. If there are preferences on topics to focus on, or suggestions to the topics themselves, please comment here or on the Table of Contents.
BTW, we just added commenting functionality to this blog template. The site is built on the 2013 WCM publishing template with sandbox extensions for the blog post layouts, rollup CQWPs, tag cloud, archive links, and comments. If there is an interest in the blog template itself, I'm open to discussions on how that could be shared or licensed as well.