White Paper : Managing Articles with SharePoint Blogs

This whitepaper illustrates approachs Inkriti developed to implement solutions for unique client project requirements around managing articles using SharePoint.

Inkriti's client is a large buying group that is comprised of thousands of nationwide dealers, who work under the branded franchise. The client wanted to build a national website, that would be able to support a unique and distinct website for each individual dealers working within their franchise.

For example, the client site might have the URL (www.company.com), while each dealer might have an automatically created URL (dealer.company.com). This dealer.company.com subsite would be unique it in ability to have custom content and custom administrative rights, while working within the context of the overall national website.

Furthermore, each dealer would be able to purchase a "package" which would provide him with a certain set of functionality -- and naturally, the more premium packages would have more functionality,while costing more.

 ARTICLE PUBLISHING NEEDS

The client wanted to manage articles on its national and dealer websites based on these distinct requirements:

• Articles published for sections nested deep inside the MyAccount functionality.
• Provide approval process for articles - not just for the national site but for numerous dealer subsites where respective dealer admins could request for particular articles to be shown in their own subsite.
• Provide additional attributes to the articles like teaser text, images, related products for articles published using SharePoint blogs.
• An ability to manage product reviews for at multiple levels - at categories, subcategories or at SKU level.
• Articles being different for national and dealer sites for the same section of the website.
• SOA architecture - Decouple SharePoint blogs functionality (with above features) so as to skin the UI as desired. The client wanted to implement an Adobe Flex solution to show articles managed through SharePoint on the website. 

The basic article management could be done using the blogs functionality of SharePoint. The challenge was to extend the default functionality provided by SharePoint to meet project needs.

The SharePoint Blogs Interface

INKRITI SOLUTION

Inkriti built solutions utilizing SharePoint blogs functionality and integrated features of SharePoint with its own set of administrative screens in a backroom and supported those through custom database schema.

SharePoint was used to provide the basic article management - that of:

• Create blogs and their (single-level) categories
• Approval workflow for publishing SharePoint blogs. Users with contribute rights can create/edit blogs which can then be approved by users with admin rights.

Multiple levels of categories for articles

In order to select and publish articles for multiple levels of categories in the website, Inkriti developed administrative screens where blogs published through SharePoint were pulled up and listed against their higher level categories. For example, if the solution needed to show articles at MyAccount -> Level1 -> Level2 category, SharePoint blogs were created with Level2 as their category. A set of tables were created to map the multiple levels of categories in the website with the single-level category in SharePoint. The administrative screen then allowed for pulling and approving artciles/blogs for a particular higher level category as mapped to SharePoint articles. The database maintained these relationships the website UI queried the database to show the correct set of articles on the UI.

Assigning Categories, Teaser Text, Images, Related Products to SharePoint Blogs

Implementing additional attributes for the articles

SharePoint blogs do not allow for teaser text, images and related products to be associate with a particular blog. The teaser text and images were needed by the application to show a preview of the article on the website. Inkriti provided for these entries to mapped to an article through the same administrative screen and maintained the relationships in its own database. 

Approval Process for the articles

The client application consisted for numerous (dealer) subsites where dealer admin could request for certain set of articles to be published on their own subsite.

SharePoint blogs interface was used to provide basic approval process for the articles. Users with contribute rights created articles in SharePoint while additional screens were provided to the application super user to attach additional attributes and then approve the articles for publishing on the website. The approval process from the additional screen was implemented using SharePoint APIs.

Additionally, dealer admins could login to the backroom application and select SharePoint articles that they would want to be displayed on their subsite. The application super user would then approve these articles for display. This functionality was implemented using custom schema to map articles with multi-level  categories to different sections of the particular dealer subsite.

<<screenshot of dealer approval process>>

SOA Architecture for display of articles

The client wanted a greater degree of control over how the articles were displayed on the website. Article management was decoupled with the website display using custom webservices - which in-turn relied on SharePoint webservices. These custom webservices relied on the schema developed by Inkriti to manage additional requirements for the articles and returned to super set of information regarding the articles. The client chose Adobe Flex to show articles and depending on the level of service chosen by the dealer subsite, enabled/disabled different functionalities while acting on the data returned by the webservices

Product reviews as SharePoint blogs

The application in question was an eCommerce application and the client wanted to manage product reviews at a much granular level while still using the SharePoint blogs interface.

SharePoint was used to create product reviews as blogs. The administrative interface then provided screens to pick product category, subcategory or SKU and map those to the reviews pulled from SharePoint using webservices. This provided for a unique way to map a single blog (if needed) to multiple levels of categories of products on the UI.

The Product Details Page with Reviews

Mapping Product Reviews to SharePoint Blogs