Share via


Upgrading an MCMS 2002 Application to SharePoint Server 2007 (Part 1 of 2)

Summary: Learn how to upgrade a Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) 2002 application to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 by using this step-by-step guide and the WoodGroveNet MCMS 2002 sample application. This article is part 1 of 2. (25 printed pages)

Microsoft Corporation

May 2007

Applies to: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Content Management Server 2002

Download WoodGroveNet.zip.

Contents

  • Introduction to Upgrading an MCMS 2002 Application

  • Planning Your Migration

  • Understanding the WoodGroveNet Sample Application

  • Migrating the Application Content

  • Migrating the Application Code

Introduction to Upgrading an MCMS 2002 Application

Updating a Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) 2002 site to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is not a difficult task. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides much of the built-in functionality that you can use to replace custom code required in MCMS, improving the maintainability of your application.

This two-part article provides a step-by-step guide to upgrade the WoodGroveNet MCMS 2002 sample application, and is a good reference for any MCMS developer who is starting to migrate to Office SharePoint Server 2007. This two-part article provides a walkthrough and a guide to migrate the MCMS 2002 Woodgrove Bank Web site to Office SharePoint Server 2007. The second part of the article is Upgrading an MCMS 2002 Application to SharePoint Server 2007 (Part 2 of 2).

Figure 1. Woodgrove Bank Web site

Woodgrove Bank Web site

The WoodGroveNet MCMS 2002 sample site demonstrates how to use Microsoft Visual C# to build an Internet-facing site with MCMS 2002.

Assumptions

This article assumes you are familiar with:

  • MCMS 2002 development concepts, tools, and operations.

  • The Woodgrove Bank sample Web site provided with MCMS 2002.

You must also have the following installed:

  • The Woodgrove Bank MCMS 2002 application

  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, capable of opening and browsing a site created in Office SharePoint Server

Planning Your Migration

Following are the basic tasks to migrate an existing MCMS 2002 application to Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Understand the application. If you are not familiar with the MCMS 2002 application code base on Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 or .NET Framework 2.0, then running the CMS Assessment Tool provides you with some great background knowledge and reports that can aid you in this effort.

Perform a content migration. Content includes channels, postings, placeholder content, custom properties, resources and resource galleries, rights groups, users, template galleries, and template gallery items. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a built-in Content Management Server Migration tool. For more information, see Migrating the Application Content later in this article.

Perform a code migration. Code includes .aspx template files, custom navigation controls, workflow customization, custom placeholder server controls, and any custom code that uses the MCMS Publishing API. Using Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can create a master page, CSS style sheets, and page layouts to bring the site back to its original state and gain access to all the new features and capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007.

For more information about planning your migration, see Planning MCMS 2002 Application Migration to SharePoint Server 2007.

Understanding the WoodGroveNet Sample Application

You might have an MCMS application that was developed some time ago, and do not know or remember exactly how it is structured. Microsoft provides the CMS Assessment Tool to help you in these cases. This tool allows you to collect useful information about your site automatically, which can help during the migration process.

The tool provides the following options to analyze different aspects of your MCMS application:

  • **Application code   **Analyzes your MCMS 2002 application code. The tool provides reports that indicate the use of MCMS Publishing API elements, and which code assets are using the API. This information can help you identify the code you need to migrate.

  • CMS Repository

    • **Gather Inventory   **Analyzes the MCMS 2002 Content Repository and generates an inventory of your MCMS assets.

    • **Collect Statistics   **Provides a set of statistics about your site, such as information about the computer on which the site is running, user and roles, cache settings, resources, template page definitions, placeholder types, and channels and postings.

    • **Run Pre-migration Analyzer   **Analyzes the MCMS 2002 Content Repository and detects potential content migration issues. In some cases, this report can even provide guidance so you can fix these problems before migrating to Office SharePoint Server.

For more details, download the MCMS 2002: CMS Assessment Tool.

Using the CMS Assessment Tool on WoodGroveNet

For detailed instructions on how to use this tool, see Assessing and Analyzing Your MCMS 2002 Application for Migration.

To run the CMS Assessment Tool on WoodGroveNet

  1. On the Start menu, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft Content Management Server, point to Assessment Tool, and then click CMS Assessment Tool.

  2. In the CMS Assessment Tool Wizard, on the Welcome page, make sure the Used Predefined Options check box is not selected, and then click Next.

  3. In the CMS Area to analyze page that appears, all available options are selected by default. Keep these values selected, and then click Next.

  4. In the Select source code files page, select Visual Studio .NET solution, and then click Browse.

  5. In the Open dialog box, select the solution file for WoodGroveNet (the default installation path for this solution is C:\Program Files\Microsoft Content Management Server\Sample Data\WoodGroveNet), and then click Next.

    Note

    You must select a debug build with .pdb files for the MCMS Web site assemblies; otherwise, the source column in reports will be blank and the line number column will be -1.

  6. In the Choose projects to analyze dialog box that opens, by default, WoodGroveNet.csproj and MCMSWebControlLibrary.csproj are selected. Click Next.

    Note

    This site is based on ASP.NET 1.1, and has a .csproj file. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 does not create .csproj files for ASP.NET 2.0 Web projects. Office SharePoint Server does not use project files either, because it is based on ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.

  7. In the Choose assemblies to analyze dialog box that opens, by default, WoodGroveNet.dll and McmsWebControlLibrary.dll are selected. Click Next

  8. In the Choose ASP.NET files to analyze dialog box that opens, by default, all .aspx and .ascx files are selected. Keep these default values selected, and then click Next.

  9. In the Set User information for CMS Repository dialog box, click Collect Posting Data. If the current user does not have rights to the CMS Repository, click Change. In the Login Information dialog box, select Log in as a different user, and then enter a logon name and password for a valid user.

  10. Click Browse. In the root channel selection dialog box, select WoodGroveNet, which is****below Channels.

  11. In the Templates Galleries list, /Templates appears by default. Select this value, and then click Remove.

  12. Click Add, select WoodGroveNet under Templates, and then click Next.

  13. In the CMS Site Analyzer dialog box, keep the default values, and then click Next.

  14. In the Repository directory selection dialog box, type a target path, for example, C:\TEMP\WoodGroveReports, and click Next. If the directory does not exist, the tool prompts you to create it.

  15. In the Ready to analyze dialog box, click Next.

  16. In the Analyzing dialog box, wait for the progress bar to reach the end. When the process is finished, the Finish button is enabled. Click Finish.

  17. On the Start menu, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft Content Management Server, point to Assessment Tool, and then click MCMS Assessment Tool Report workbook. This loads the workbook in Microsoft Office Excel.

  18. Click the Load Analysis Results button. In the Select folder with the Assessment Tool output dialog box, select the folder you specified for your output. Click OK.

The information is loaded. You can use the Menu button to navigate between the different assessment reports.

The assessment reports provide valuable information on your application. To understand how to use the CMS Assessment Tool to determine the level of work required to migrate your MCMS 2002 site to Office SharePoint Server 2007, see Assessing and Analyzing Your MCMS 2002 Application for Migration.

Migrating the Application Content

An MCMS application contains both content and code. The first step of a migration is moving your data over to Office SharePoint Server. Office SharePoint Server provides a tool for this purpose.

To perform a content migration, you must do the following:

  1. Prepare the target. You must get Office SharePoint Server ready for the MCMS content by creating an empty site collection.

  2. Create a migration profile. You use a migration profile to indicate to Office SharePoint Server where to find your content in MCMS. The migration profile allows you to perform pre-migration analysis that detects issues with your content that you should address before migration.

  3. Execute the profile. If there are no issues with your content, you indicate to Office SharePoint Server to perform the migration of content.

Preparing the Target

The first step in the migration process is preparing a place to put your content. To do that, you must first create a Web application in Office SharePoint Server, and then set up an empty Office SharePoint Server site collection.

The Office SharePoint Server 2007 Content Management Server migration fails, by design, if the target site for migration is not empty. The following steps help you create such a site based upon the supplied Publishing Portal Site template.

To create a Web application and a new empty site collection

  1. Log on the server where Office SharePoint Server 2007 is installed, click Start, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and then click SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.

  2. Click the Application Management link.

  3. Click the Create or Extend Web link.

    The Create or Extend Web Application page opens.

  4. Click the Create a New Web Application link.

    By default, Create a New IIS Web Site is selected; keep this selection.

  5. In the description field, type Office SharePoint Server 2007 version of Woodgrove.

  6. For the port field, enter the number of an unused port in your server. In a newly installed computer, you can use a number such as 32490. If this port is already used, the application will indicate it.

    Note

    This number will be used in the URL to access your application. If you use a different port than the one specified here (32490), remember to update the URL references used in this article, accordingly.

  7. Keep the default values for the following:

    • Host Header field

    • Path field

    • Security Configuration section

    • Load Balanced URL section

  8. In the Application Pool section, the Create new application pool section is selected. Type WoodgroveAppPool for the application pool name.

  9. Type a valid user name and password.

  10. In the database section, keep the default value for the Database Server.

  11. For the Database Name, type WSS_WoodGrove.

  12. Leave all the other fields with their default values.

  13. If the user you are using has enough rights to access the Office SharePoint Server content database, click OK at the end of the page.

    The message Operation in Progress is displayed.

  14. When the application is created, a page appears with that message. In the page, click the Create a new Windows SharePoint Services site collection link.

    The Create Site Collection form appears.

  15. In the Web Application drop-down list, select the new Web application. If you used the port 32490, the URL will be similar to http://<yourservername>:32490. If you used another port, select http://<yourservername>:<port>.

  16. In the title field, type WoodgroveCollection.

  17. In the description field, type Woodgrove Site Collection.

  18. Select Create site at this URL, and then select “/". The URL of the site is http://<yourservername>:32490 because the site will be created at the root.

  19. In Template Selection Area, click the Publishing tab. On the Publishing tab, click Publishing Portal.

  20. In the Primary Site Collection Administrator field, type a valid user name. Keep the default value in the Quota Template field.

  21. Click OK.

    A page with a message that indicates that the top-level site was created successfully will be displayed. When it does, you should restart the server.

  22. Click Start, and then click Run. In the Run dialog box, type cmd, and then click OK.

  23. In the Command Prompt window, type iisreset /noforce.

  24. When the command is finished, type exit and press ENTER.

Creating a Migration Profile

Now you must create a Migration Profile in SharePoint Server 2007 Central Administration to migrate the Woodgrove Bank MCMS 2002 sample site. This profile tells the Content Migration engine the information it needs to connect to the old MCMS 2002 repository, and where to put your content in Office SharePoint Server.

To create a migration profile

  1. On the Start menu, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and then click SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.

  2. On the Central Administration home page, click the Operations tab.

  3. Under Update and Migration, click Microsoft Content Management Server Migration.

  4. On the Manage Microsoft Content Management Server Migration Profiles page, click New Migration Profile.

  5. In the Create Migration Profile form, in the name field, type WoodgroveContentMigration.

  6. In the description field, type Migration of the Woodgrove content to Office SharePoint Server 2007.

  7. In Database Server Name, type the name of the server with the SQL database for Woodgrove.

  8. Choose the authentication type.

  9. Type a logon name and a password.

  10. Click Connect. If a green connect appears, continue. If not, try another database server, or logon and password combination.

  11. Select the database that contains your Woodgrove data.

  12. In the destination section, select the Web application you previously created for this purpose. Type https://localhost:32490 and specify / for Site Collection.

  13. To specify the portion of the MCMS site that you will migrate, in Top Level Site, select WoodGroveNet. This is where you indicate which part of the MCMS database to migrate.

    Leave all the other default values unchanged.

  14. In the notification section, select both Send e-mail when the migration job succeeds and Send e-mail if the migration job fails, and type your e-mail address in the box below the options.

    You are returned to the Manage Microsoft Content Management Server Migration Profiles page.

Executing the Migration Profile

Now all you need to do is to indicate to Office SharePoint Server to start the migration process. Before you execute the migration profile, verify that the site collection is empty. A site collection is empty if it does not contain any pages or sites. The Publishing Portal template used to create the Site Collection does not create empty sites.

To empty your sites for a content migration

  1. Open Internet Explorer.

  2. Type http://<yourservername>:32490/ in the address bar, and then press ENTER.

    A page is displayed with the name WoodgroveCollection.

  3. Click the Site Actions link on the top right corner, and then click Manage Content and Structure.

    The Site Content and Structure page appears. A tree control on the left displays the WoodgroveCollection we just created.

    By default this collection includes a Press Releases site and a Search site.

  4. Pause the mouse pointer over the Press Releases site on the left tree control. A small arrow appears on the right on the Press Releases label. Click the small arrow.

  5. On the menu that appears, click Delete.

  6. In the confirmation dialog box that opens, click OK.

  7. Repeat steps 1–6 for the Search site.

After you verify that the Site Collection is empty, you can start the content migration. Be aware that this process can take some time.

To start content migration

  1. If you are not already on the Manage Microsoft Content Management Server Migration Profiles page, on the Start menu, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, and then click SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.

  2. On the Central Administration home page, click the Operations tab.

  3. Under Update and Migration, click Content Management Server Migration.

  4. On the Manage Microsoft Content Management Server Migration Profiles page, pause the mouse pointer over the name of the WoodgroveContentMigration profile, and then click the small arrow that appears to the right.

  5. On the menu that appears, select what you want to do:

    • Click Analyze. The migration tool only detects possible issues that affect the migration of your content database.

    • Click Run to start the migration.

    The status column for your migration profile changes to Initializing.

  6. After a few minutes, refresh the page until the Status changes to Succeeded.

Data Migration Issues

After the content migration is finished, you can go to the Manage Microsoft Content Management Server Migration Profiles page and click the Status column for your Migration Profile. It shows a Migration Report that indicates if any warnings or issues were found during the migration process.

Figure 2. Issues reported during content migration

Bb466172.aebab639-098d-4b6d-a49e-380cf2484889(en-us,office.12).gif

For information about these issues, see the Office SharePoint Server Reference documentation.

Results of the Initial Migration

You can now view the results of the initial migration.

To see initial migration results

  1. Using Internet Explorer 6 or 7, browse to the Internet Presence Web Site you just created, which should be located at address https://localhost:32490.

    Figure 3. Woodgrove site just after migration

    Figure 3 Woodgrove site just after migration

    Now your content is migrated to Office SharePoint Server 2007. This is only the content; all of the site navigation is provided by the publishing site definition.

    Click Site Actions (upper right corner), and then select Manage Content and Structure on the drop-down menu that appears. This shows you a very familiar view of Woodgrove Bank, similar to the one presented using the MCMS Site Manager.

    Figure 4. Administration pages to manage site content

    Administration pages to manage site content

All of your channels are migrated to sites. The postings within the channels are migrated as Pages in the pages list of each site. To see the list of postings, click the Pages link, as shown in the following figure.

Figure 5. Page library holding some migrated postings

Page library holding some migrated postings

A default page layout file is generated for all templates. To see the list of page layouts (shown in the following figure), open the master page gallery for the WoodGroveNet site collection.

Figure 6. Navigating to master page gallery using the SharePoint Server Web interface

Navigating to master page gallery

A folder named WoodGroveNet is generated in the Master Page Gallery. Inside this folder, you have a folder for each template gallery you had in MCMS.

Figure 7. WoodGroveNet folder contains migrated templates from WoodGroveNet

WoodgroveNet folder contains migrated templates

You can edit these default page layouts by using Office SharePoint Designer.

Figure 8. Page layouts under the About Us Net folder

Page Layouts under the About Us Net folder

A content type is generated for each template definition. Look for these in the Site Content Type Gallery.

Figure 9. Content types created during content migration

Content types created during content migration

Even your users and roles are migrated as Office SharePoint Server users and Groups, respectively.

Migrating the Application Code

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a great amount of built-in functionality. Part of the work of migrating an application from MCMS is determining which functionality can now be provided by using some of the built-in features.

You can follow this general process:

  1. Identify code you need to migrate.

  2. Build a master page.

  3. Apply the master page to default page layouts.

  4. Modify each default page layout to look like the original MCMS Template.

  5. Add Summary Controls.

Identify Code that You Need to Migrate

To identify which code to migrate, you must inventory your application code. You can do this by using the CMS Assessment Tool. Run the CMS Assessment Tool on the WoodGroveNet sample application.

This provides a set of different reports that we use to identify code that must be migrated. The tool generates the reports we discuss in this section. You need to determine what these controls are used for and how you go about achieving that functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007.

First, look at the Site Summary Report from the CMS Assessment Tool. You can quickly see that Woodgrove has 12 .aspx pages and 6 .ascx controls.

Figure 10. Site Summary report for Woodgrove

Site Summary report for WoodGrove

Let’s focus on the .aspx pages first. We will look at the Template Information Summary, which lists the site templates. This helps us determine which .aspx files were template files and which were not. Also, look at the postings count for these templates. It might not make sense to migrate templates with zero or very few postings, because if the old site does not have many postings with these templates, they might not be very important or used.

Woodgrove has only 8 templates and all have postings. Woodgrove is just a sample site with a few templates. In a real application with many templates, you might find that having templates with only 3 or 4 postings would not justify migrating them to Office SharePoint Server 2007. Woodgrove has a total of 12 .aspx pages. The remaining .aspx files (FrameFooter.aspx, FrameHeader.aspx, FrameNavigation.aspx, and Frameset.aspx) are not template files, and we must still determine why they were used and if they are needed in Office SharePoint Server.

Figure 11. Image of Template Information report for Woodgrove site

Image of Template Information report for WoodGrove

Use the ASP.NET Control Usage report to determine the controls that are present in your application. Following are the controls present in Woodgrove:

  • Header.ascx

  • Footer.ascx

  • LeftNavigation.ascx

  • DefaultConsole.ascx

  • HeadTags.ascx

  • LatestPress.ascx

  • McmsBreadcrumbControl

  • McmsDHTMLGlobalNavigation

  • McmsNavigationControl

  • McmsSummary

Figure 12. ASP.NET Control Usage report for Woodgrove

ASP.NET Control Usage report for Woodgrove

We need to determine what these controls are used for. The ASP.NET Control Usage report, for example, helps you determine which user controls are possible parts of a common look and feel, by determining which controls are present in most templates.

Prior to MCMS 2002 SP2, sites were developed with ASP.NET 1.x, so they were not able to take advantage of concepts such as master pages or new controls such as ASP Login Controls available in ASP.NET 2.0. User (.ascx) controls were usually created to provide elements that could be reused in your templates to give them a common “look and feel."

In general, your controls will be a type that is of one of the following categories:

  • Navigation and Look and Feel

  • Summary or Link Controls

  • Authoring Consoles

  • Additional Functionality

Navigation and Look and Feel Controls

To determine the look and feel of your application, and the navigation controls that are used, look at the Posting Information report. This report lists the Channel where the postings are. Use the Channel location to build the actual URL of some of the postings. For example for postings “August 30 2001," “Line of Credit," and “Help Desk Analyst," the URLs will look like https://localhost/WoodGroveNet/About+Us/Press+Releases/August+20+2001.htm, https://localhost/WoodGroveNet/About+Us/Help+Desk+Analyst.htm, and https://localhost/WoodGroveNet/Small+Business/Services/Line+of+credit.htm, respectively. Just replace the /Channels part of the Channel information with the address of your server, and replace spaces with a "+" to build the MCMS URL for the posting.

Figure 13. Posting information report for Woodgrove sample site

Posting information report for WoodGrove site

Open your browser, and point to https://localhost/WoodGroveNet/About+Us/Press+Releases/August+20+2001.htm.

Figure 14. Posting for August 30, 2001, using Press Release template

August 30, 2001 posting (Press Release template)

You’ll see that the page seems to have a header, a footer, and a navigational element on the left. Next, open Visual Studio 2005, and open the solution for Woodgrove (the default installation path is c:\Program Files\Microsoft Content Management Server\Sample Data\WoodgroveNet\). Look at the template file for this posting (Press Release.aspx) in Visual Studio, and look at the controls that are used to build the chrome of the page.

Now open https://localhost/WoodGroveNet/About+Us/Help+Desk+Analyst.htm in your browser. You’ll see that this page has a similar look and feel. Also open it in Visual Studio, and look at the template file for this posting (Job Posting.aspx). You’ll see that it uses the same controls.

Figure 15. Posting for Help Desk Analyst using the Job Posting Template

Help Desk Analyst posting (Job Posting template)

Finally, open https://localhost/WoodGroveNet/Small+Business/Services/Line+of+credit.htm in your browser, and open the corresponding template file (Services.aspx) in Visual Studio. You’ll see the resemblance.

Figure 16. Posting for Line of Credit using the Services template

Line of Credit posting (Services template)

ASP.NET 1.x did not provide built-in support for site navigation. MCMS Web developers had to create controls that used the Publishing API to provide links that allowed the user to browse the sites more easily.

ASP.NET 2.0 provides a concept of SiteMapProviders, which you can use to determine the ways in which you want your site to be navigated. This provider model allows the separation of the navigation UI code from the data access code. Navigation UI controls that feed on that information and build menus, navigation bars, or breadcrumbs are now available by default.

Using this knowledge, we will replace all navigational controls in Woodgrove with SharePoint Server or ASP.NET 2.0 navigational controls, and replace common look and feel controls by using a master page.

Header.ascx

Header.ascx provides a common header for all pages. This control is present in all templates and implements a header navigation bar. The header navigation bar consists of three links on the green bar at the top of the Web page, as shown in Figure 17.

Figure 17. Header navigation bar

Header navigation bar

The Woodgrove Header.ascx user control encapsulates JavaScript scripts, the McmsDHTMLGlobalNavigation server control, and the graphics elements that make up the header navigation bar.

If you look at the User Methods Calling Publishing API report from the CMS Assessment Tool, you can see that this control uses the Publishing API to create links to Channels.

Figure 18. Methods in Woodgrove code that invoke PAPI functions

Woodgrove code methods that invoke PAPI functions

The report indicates that this control uses several methods of the CmsHttpContext, Channel, and ChannelCollection objects, which indicate that this control is iterating through the Channel hierarchy of the application.

If you look at the Site Manager or the Channel Information report and examine the Channel hierarchy, you can see that the three links it shows are the top-level Channels. The drop-down menus that appear when you pause over a top-level Channel are the sub-Channels.

Figure 19. Channel Information report

Channel Information report

To provide the same common header in our page layouts in Office SharePoint Server 2007, we can take advantage of the master page concept of the .NET 2.0, and put the HTML elements of the Header.ascx elements directly on a master page.

To provide a menu, ASP.NET 2.0 has a Menu control that can be configured easily to provide a global navigation menu, such as the one provided by the McmsDHTMLGlobalNavigation object. There are third-party .NET 2.0 controls available as well from vendors such as ComponentArt, but we will use the built-in .NET 2.0 controls in this example.

For more information on the ASP.NET 2.0 Menu control, see Introducing the ASP.NET 2.0 TreeView and Menu Controls or ASP.NET Menu Control Overview.

Footer.ascx

The Footer.ascx control creates a common page footer for all pages to provide the copyright message and a legal disclaimer link.

Figure 20. Display of the Footer.ascx control

Display of the Footer.ascx control

We will put the contents of Footer.ascx directly on our master page.

LeftNavigation.ascx

LeftNavigation.ascx presents a hierarchical tree view of the site along the left edge of the page. This control encapsulates the McmsNavigationControl server control. Look at the User Methods Calling PAPI report to see how this control uses the Publishing API to access the CmsHttpContext, Postings, and Channels from user methods such as FindStartChannel, CreateTree, and CreatePostings. This lets us suppose that it just transverses the Channel and postings hierarchy and creates and populates a TreeControl with that information.

Figure 21. McmsNavigationControl server control

McmsNavigationControl server control

This kind of functionality is provided in the built-in master pages, and it is provided using a SharePoint:AspMenu control. For most sites you need to customize only this control. You could also use an ASP.NET 2.0 Tree or Menu control. Office SharePoint Server even provides a PortalSiteMapDataSource data source, which knows how to retrieve data from a PortalSiteMapProvider object and expose this data according to the ASP.NET hierarchical data source interface.

McmsBreadcrumbControl

By looking at the Channel hierarchy in the Site Manager we can determine that this control is providing a trail you can follow to your current position in the repository structure.

The Users Methods Calling PAPI report shows that it uses the Publishing API, and it seems that it builds an array of the parents of the current page and then renders it as a series of links.

Figure 22. Analyzing PAPI usage in the McmsBreadCrumbControl

Analyzing PAPI usage in the McmsBreadCrumbControl

Figure 23. The Breadcrumb control

The Breadcrumb control

This is a very common functionality, and is now provided in ASP.NET 2.0 with the SiteMap control.

Building the Woodgrove Bank Master Page

Master pages provide a simple way to make the appearance of all your pages in a Web site consistent. We will now build a master page to apply to all page layouts to provide a common look and feel.

To create your master page, you can copy one of the existing master pages and re-arrange the controls, modifying the layout and the look and feel. You can, of course, completely start from scratch. Starting with a blank page involves some work and might get you into problems because Office SharePoint Server requires that certain controls are always available on a master page. The Web content management in Office SharePoint Server provides several built-in general master pages. One of them, the BlueBand.master provides Top Navigation, Left Navigation, BreadCrumb, and support for the Office SharePoint Server authoring console—which is almost the functionality provided in the original Woodgrove design. To create our first master page, we will copy the BlueBand.master and rearrange the controls to suit our needs.

For further information about the built-in master pages, see Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites (Part 1 of 3): Understanding Web Content Management and the Default Features.

For more information about master pages, see the following:

Copying the BlueBand.master Master Page

We must first create a copy of the BlueBand.master Master Page.

To create a copy of BlueBand.master

  1. Open Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. You can use this tool to create, edit, or customize master pages. On the Start menu, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft Office, and then click Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

  2. On the File menu, click Open Site.

  3. In the Open Site dialog box, type https://localhost:32490 in the site name field.

    A dialog box indicating that the SharePoint Designer is trying to open the site appears. If the SharePoint Designer is able to open the site, the folder list pane is updated.

  4. In the folder list, expand the _catalog node, and then select the masterpage node.

  5. Right-click BlueBand.master, and then click Copy.

  6. Right-click the masterpage node, and then click Paste.

  7. Right-click the element called BlueBand_copy(1).master that is added to the end of the list, and then rename it Woodgrove.master.

    Office SharePoint Server relies heavily on the use of cascading style sheets. This master page uses the Band.css. We will make a copy of this file also.

  8. In the folder list, expand the Style Library node.

  9. Expand the en-us (Style Library) folder, and then expand the Core Styles (Style Library) folder.

  10. Right-click the Band.css file, and then click Copy.

  11. Right-click the Core Styles (Style Library) folder, and then click Paste.

    A file named Band_copy(1).css is added to the end of the list.

  12. Rename Band_copy(1).css to Woodgrove.css.

You should also import the images that your site needs. The site we created for Woodgrove already contains an images folder.

For Woodgrove, we import the WoodGroveLogoBlack.gif file and logo.gif file. These files are located in Images folder of the Woodgrove source. Open the images source folder with Windows Explorer. Drag this file to the images folder you just created. An importing dialog box appears. When the operation is finished, the dialog box closes.

Next step: Upgrading an MCMS 2002 Application to SharePoint Server 2007 (Part 2 of 2).

Additional Resources

For more information, see the following resources: