SharePoint
2013 Cross-Site Publishing Overview: Part 1
What is XSP:
“simple
manner you write content in one place and have it published somewhere else”
Cross-Site Publishing is very simple publishing
is a feature driven method that lets you create and maintain content in one or
more authoring site collections or web application and publish or display this
content in one or more publishing site collections by using content Search Web
Parts.
Cross-site publishing complements the already
existing publishing method, author-in-place, where you use a single site
collection to author content and make it available to readers of your site.
In this post, I introduce the concepts behind
XSP. In my next blog post,will do the configuration steps.
Quick Understanding about XSP
An authoring site(Product Site) is where
authors go to create and host content; think of it as the source in XSP.
This is where a list that is marked as a catalog lives.
- A catalog is an
attribute that you can add to a list or a library in the authoring site.
Marking a list or a library as a catalog makes the content easily
accessible to other site collections.
- Search is the
engine that connects your catalog to a publishing site.
- The term
store holds
metadata terms that are used to organize content for publishing on target
sites.
- A publishing site is
where visitors go to see and read content & where the content needs to
be publish.
Managed Navigation is a feature beyond the
scope of this blog post, but to understand how the Term Store fits into this
picture, its use should be briefly described.
To organize the content on the authoring site,
a managed metadata site column is used to categorize the articles by type.
These tagging terms are used on the publishing
side to build up a navigation structure and as part of the search query that is
used to pull the article data.
How the cross-site publishing works
Cross-site publishing uses search technology to retrieve
content.
- On
a site collection where the Cross-Site Collection Publishing feature is
enabled, libraries and lists have to be enabled as catalogs before the
content can be reused in other site collections.
- The
content of the library or list catalogs must be crawled and added to the
search index.
- The
content can then be displayed in a publishing site collection by using one
or more Search Web Parts.
- When
we are changing the content in an authoring site collection, those changes
are displayed on all site collections that reuse this content, as we are
using continuous crawl.
High Level
Architecture for XSP:
Why XSP:
Let us assume the content authors can add
content in a controlled environment, meaning they can add the content in
authoring site which is AD authenticated. Let us name it https://gowthamproduct.
This content is shared or displayed in Published
sites web application which is configured to allow anonymous access for
external users. Let us name it https://gowthampublish
By the
time your goin to create another web application where you can store
your site assets like images and videos. Now this web application allows read
access to anonymous user while it requires authentication for modifying/adding
contents. Let us name it https://gowthamelectronics
·
· Imagine that you’re working on a small number
of sites that all need to show content from a common library.
For example, my company team created their Internet site for the india ,
but they also want to put up a site in Europe.
XSP can
be used to author in one place, and then present the content in many other
locations, too!
Configuring XSP is an advanced publishing scenario. I will
post the scenarios soon.