I'm getting clients starting to ask why they should get MOSS and what makes it better than WSS V2 or Portal Server 2003?
So, now I'm trying to decide which features are relevant and how to 'sell' them without confusing non-technical types. I thought I'd post what I came up with.
First stop Content Types - because they are on my mind from the last post.
The offical description makes good points about helping users organise their content and centralizing management of meta data etc.
For me (hopefully in business user speak!), the biggest value add's come from:
Re-use
Being able to use a single definition of a type of content across many lists (when I say list, obviously I mean any type of list, including Document Libraries). So I can have one vision of what a Task is for the organisation/team/site subject to scope. And I can stop people messing with it if I make it read-only (not the correct term actually and not simple as I will post about later today!). Now instead of as was the case in V2 having people with all kinds of different status fields (like Percent Complete, Complete Percent, Progress so Far etc) I have one that is common to all task lists. So reporting is consistant - more on that at some point!
The things you can hang off them
Like workflow, templates (for document based content types) and forms for editing, adding and viewing items. So I can have a workflow that happens for any list item that is of Content Type X, rather than having to setup a workflow in each list where the are items of type X. I can control what the UI looks like for a user when they add, edit or display an item, without having to have this detail stored in all my lists, and hence touching them all when it changes.
Inheritance
You can define a base set of fields to be captured for all (or a group of) content and let users extend this set of meta data as they require. For example you might want to enforce a Client Name and Project ID for all client facing documents, eg. specs and contracts etc, but let users add other columns as they require such as technologies used, or expiry date.
Search criteria
You can use Content Type, just like any other search property, so you can searches like 'find all contract documents'. Actually documents is really files, because any file can be of content type Contract, perhaps a PDF from a client or supplier for example.
I wrote most of this when I was thinking about what I might say to a client, and then I realised that I had not actually done any of this, so I took some time today to have a look at the doing part. I got stumped at the first item - reuse. Can you really enforce columns of a content type in a list and still allow people with Manage List rights to add columns as required?
I'm about to post the answers, hang on...
