Thursday, January 11, 2007 8:57 PM
Jan Tielens
How-to Enable Scheduled Publishing in a MOSS Collaboration Portal
Today I got an interesting question in the U2U Sharepoint 2007 DevCamp in Copenhagen which I couldn't answer straight away (this happens more than I'd like it to happen). After some searching and with the help of one of the attendees we finally managed to answer the question!
In a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Publishing Portal (aka Internet Facing Website, aka CMS vNext site) you can choose to schedule the publishing of pages. For example, suppose you would like to advertise a message on your site during a specified period of time (eg from the 25th of December to the 1st of January). This is possible because the underlying Page Publishing Content Type has the required fields (Scheduling Start Date and Scheduling End Date); the Page Layouts make use of this Content Type.
In a MOSS 2007 Collaboration Portal (aka Enterprise Portal, aka SPS vNext site) Page Layouts are used in the same way as in a Publishing Portal, so I supposed they would offer the same scheduled publication feature too. Wrong! Out-of-the-box publishing pages in Collaboration Portals can't be scheduled; the Publishing Console doesn't show this option:
My first guess was that the Page Layout for pages in Collaboration Portals didn't use the Content Type which included the Scheduling Start and End date, but wrong again; they do. It turned out that it's a setting on the document library itself (Manage Item Scheduling). To enable this functionality you need to follow these steps:
- Navigate to the Document Library Settings page of the Pages document library. You can find the Pages document library by clicking the View All Site Content link on top of the Quick Launch.
- Click the Versioning Settings link and enable content approval, verify as well that both major and draft versions are allowed.
- Click OK and so you'll end up back on the Settings page of the document library. Now click the Manage Item Scheduling link.
- Check the Enable scheduling of items in this list option and click OK. Voila, now you will be able to schedule the publication of pages in this document library!
To actually schedule a page to be published in a specific timeframe, create a new page in the modified Pages document library (or edit an existing one). The Publishing Console will show the Publication Start Date.
If you click the Immediately link, you can enter the schedule:
