Plan content approval and scheduling

Applies To: Office SharePoint Server 2007

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Topic Last Modified: 2016-11-14

In this article:

  • Plan governance

  • Plan scheduling

  • Governance and scheduling in a content deployment scenario

In addition to planning how much control you want users to have over altering the appearance of your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Web site, you also need to plan how much governance you want content contributors to have over your site content. Governance refers to the rules and processes that you want to establish for your site. For example, you may want users to impose restrictions and functionality when authors create content. You have the option of giving users no control, simple moderation, or the ability to start a workflow after they submit content. You can also plan restrictions on where and what type of content an author can place in certain areas of your site.

At this time you also need to understand how the scheduling process works. Users can set a publish and unpublish date by setting the appropriate schedule.

Plan governance

There are two steps in planning governance. The first step is to determine how and if you want content to go through an approval process. The second step is to determine what content can appear in specific areas of your site.

Plan content moderation or workflow approval

Content moderation and workflow approval is the method by which site members with Approver permissions control the publication of content. In Office SharePoint Server 2007, governance can fall within three moderation and workflow approval categories:

  1. **None   **If you choose to implement no moderation or workflow, after an author submits content for publishing it goes live immediately. If a document library is configured to support major and minor versions of content and no content moderation is used, users who have Read permissions will be able to see minor versions of the content.

  2. **Simple moderation   **You configure this if you want content manually approved by a member of the Approver group after an author submits it for publishing. Simple moderation is the default in the Corporate Intranet Presence Template in Office SharePoint Server 2007. In the Intranet Presence Template, document libraries and image libraries are also configured to use simple moderation.

  3. **Approval workflow   **You configure this if you want a workflow to run the approval process. Using a workflow makes the approval process more automated and takes advantage of the built-in workflow features, such as automatically sending e-mail to approvers, adding approval tasks to approvers' task lists, and letting authors track the status of the approval process. The pages list in the Internet Presence Template includes a default approval workflow. Users can also develop their own custom approval workflow. See the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Software Development Kit (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=71218&clcid=0x409) for more information about creating custom workflows.

Plan where and how content can appear

Governance also dictates where you want content to appear on your site by introducing restrictions over where certain types of content can appear. You specify this by configuring the site settings for the site templates or page layouts you want authors to use. For example, you may want authors to use a publishing site template, but restrict them from using a Team Site template. Likewise, you can also force users to use the page layout where a graphic always appears on the left side of the page as opposed to the right side.

Plan scheduling

Users have the ability to schedule when they want content to appear, but they can only do this if they create content that uses major or minor versioning. For more information about versioning, see the article Plan versioning, content approval, and check-outs.

The scheduled start times and dates are initiated by a timer service that has a one-minute lag time. It runs on a 24-hour clock, and it continually checks for pages and items in the document library or image library that is ready for publishing.

Governance and scheduling in a content deployment scenario

The content deployment feature is designed for sites that use a multi-farm topology. For more information about multi-farm topologies see Design logical architecture and Deployment for Office SharePoint Server 2007. A multi-farm topology consists of separate authoring, publishing, and possibly staging farms. If you are implementing a multi-farm topology, you need to apply all the governance considerations outlined in this article for each farm in your environment.

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