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Publishing Model Determination

SharePoint Server 2013 has three ways that you can make published content available to users: *content deployment, author-in-place and cross-site publishing. Deciding which publishing method to use is an important step in planning publishing sites. The publishing method that you select will lead to additional planning steps, and some steps are unique to each method. Use the following flowchart to help you determine which publishing method to use:

Although cross-site publishing is the recommended method to use for making content available to multiple sites, it might not be the right method for your publishing solution. You should not use cross-site publishing if you do not plan to use variations with unique URLs, or publish to multiple sites, and you want to author content on the same site collection in which it is published. Use author-in-place instead.

*Content deployment is not listed in this diagram since it not recommended for enterprise content publishing architectures but is still a viable option for other scenarios.

Content Deployment Publishing

Content Deployment jobs are a native SharePoint functionality that allows to move (published / see it as a major version list item) content from an environment A to environment B. This is extremely handy when you need to work on the same content but deploy it on different network location (inside / outside DMZ) with their own security policies (eg: no write access at all in production).

Overview

1. Database for Authoring site collection
2. Authoring site collection. Authorized users edit content by authenticating via HTTPS URL. Content is only viewable to anonymous users once it is approved and published.
3. Default SharePoint Content Deployment pushes content changes to publishing site every x minutes controlled by timer job.
4. Database for Publishing site collection
5. Publishing site collection. Anonymous users view only published content via HTTP URL.

Advantages

• Public preview of published anonymous accessible content.
• Separate server farms can be used for authoring and publishing to meet security requirements.

Disadvantages

• Two physical copies of the same data. Increased hardware requirements to accommodate the duplicate data.
• Anytime the content deployment chain is broken (site is deleted, recreated, content altered outside of content deployment) the destination and jobs have to be deleted and rebuilt.

 Author in Place Publishing

Uses a single site collection to author content and make it available to readers of your site. If you plan to publish only Pages library content, and you do not have to author on more than one site, or publish to more than one site, and you do not have a business need to author separately from your production environment, you should use author-in-place. If you must publish multilingual content, you can still use variations to make content available to sites in multiple languages or regions. Author-in-place is available in both SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Online.

Overview

1. Single content database used for minimized overhead.
2. Single site collection that is extended to enable multiple authentication methods.
3. Authorized users edit content by authenticating via HTTPS URL. Content is only viewable to anonymous users once it is approved and published.
4. Anonymous users view only published content via HTTP URL.

Advantages

• Fast publishing model. Once content is published, it will be available via the publishing site.
• Reduced hardware and application overhead.
• Reduced complexity compared to other models since content is never duplicated.

Disadvantages

• No public preview of published anonymous accessible content.
• Governance plan controls for what and when content is published are critical.

Cross-site Publishing

Uses one or more site collections to author content, and one or more site collections to control the design of the site and the display of the content. If you want to separate your authoring and publishing environments, you should use cross-site publishing. If you plan to publish only Pages library content, but you want to author in more than one site, or publish to more than one site, you should also use cross-site publishing. Cross-site publishing is available only in SharePoint Server 2013.

Overview

1. Content is created in libraries and lists that are shared as catalogs in the authoring site collection.
2. The search system crawls the content and builds the search index.
3. A user views a page on a publishing site, which triggers queries from Search Web Parts.
4. Results are returned from the search index, and shown in Search Web Parts on the page.

Advantages

• Single source content can be reused in all publishing sites.
• Dynamic content updates.

Disadvantages

• No public preview of published anonymous accessible content.
• SharePoint search service is required to continuously crawl all sites.
• Additional hardware resources.
• More complex publishing model.

References:

Plan for Internet, intranet, and extranet publishing sites in SharePoint Server 2013

Best practices for publishing sites (SharePoint Server 2010)