Ben Robb from cScape has written an excellent guest article about his company’s use of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 beta 2, MOSS 2007. cScape was tasked with delivering a full featured public facing website for the Ministry of Sound. This is a difficult task with previous versions of SharePoint, but cScape was able to do just that with amazing results.
Ben begins,
“Building a MOSS-based website is very similar to any other website project. You can use any of the formal process driven methodologies such as the Microsoft Solutions Framework or one of the Agile methodologies. Due to the fairly tight timescales and a very close working relationship with the client, we used an iterative Agile methodology to ensure that what we delivered met expectations. We managed risks, issues and general documentation via an extranet team site running on WSS 3.0.”
Ben’s step-by-step guide through their development process follows.
1. Define your basic site map and designs
2. Define your Content Columns and Content Types
3. Define your Custom Lists
4. Create the basic site hierarchy
5. Add your images and CSS files
6. Build your Master Pages
7. Build your Page Layouts
8. Customize your Content Query webpart views
Ben’s final conclusion on working with MOSS 2007,
“While there was a fairly large learning curve to overcome during this project, the fact that our developers were experienced in both SharePoint and MCMS technologies did reduce the curve dramatically. Working closely with our clients meant that we were able to rapidly develop and deliver the project – in a timescale of weeks rather than months.”
Using ASP.NET Master Pages, CSS, WebParts, and the Office 2007 SharePoint Designer, they’ve been able to create a maintainable Web Site built on the SharePoint platform branded to very specific requirements and created quite a buzz over on the MSDN Enterprise Content Management blog.