Re: new to MCMS questions

> The content editing controls can be either the default Ektron editor or 
> the
> Telerik editor. I'm not sure if the Ektron editor presently shipping with
> MCMS can be run in FireFox, but Ekton's editors do run in FireFox on the
> Windows platform. The Telerik editor works in FireFox and is 100% browser
> based. It works best in IE on Windows, works rather well in FireFox on
> windows, and I *believe* has problems in FF/Mozilla on Mac. So the short
> answer is that you do have viable editor options.

The ActiveX placeholder control that ships with MCMS is Windows 
IE-compatible only.  For any other browser or platform, the free Telerik 
control should do the trick.  There's also a suite of controls that Telerik 
is selling for a fee that enhance the capabilities of MCMS:
http://www.mcmscontrols.com/

If you can replace all of the standard MCMS dialogs with this and the WAE 
mentioned below, MCMS should be cross-browser and cross-platform compatible, 
depending on how well your developers write the HTML/CSS for the ASPX 
templates.

An alternative to the WAE controls is to write some custom web controls 
yourself that replace some of the non-compatible dialogs (like the Page and 
Channel Properties windows).  Then the authoring becomes much more 
compatible.

There are many examples out there in the newsgroup and on blog sites like 
Stefan Gossner.  Links to some of the better resources can be found here:
http://www.wardworks.com/joel/

>> 2. My next question relates to documentation... I see there
>> are only a few books specific to MCMS and those I've found
>> are targeted to the developer/administrator, not the lay
>> person. I am not a developer myself though I have a good deal
>> of knowledge of general CMS concepts as well as other tools
>> on the market. But this tool is not the most straightforward
>> application and the MS documentation is not very helpful from
>> my experience thus far.

In the Packt book, there is a chapter or two that may be helpful for the 
non-technical folks to learn about the MCMS interface.  But you're right, 
there isn't much out there on how the actual authoring users should utilize 
MCMS.  The only other place I can think of is in the helpfile that is 
installed with MCMS (also available as a download from 
www.microsoft.com/cmserver).

> MCMS is really a Web CMS toolkit. It is not that friendly as an end-user
> product, requires a fair bit of customization, and works best (most 
> usable)
> if the web author front end is massaged a bit for the client's needs.

Amen.

Though the MCMS.Rapid just came out, which may help things a bit:
http://www.mcmsrapid.com/

It's supposed to speed development of MCMS websites.

> Depending on the budget and project resources you may want to explore  IT
> Hit's Web Author Enhancements (WAE 2.0)
> <http://mcms.ithit.com/features/features.html>. It's not cheap, but adds
> significant functionality and improves usability of the MCMS web-based
> authoring tools.
>
> You may also want to check out this book:
> http://www.packtpub.com/book/mcms . It's the most recent and was written 
> by
> some very credible folk. In general though, we end up producing some 
> custom
> documentation for our clients.

As I can say from experience :-), that book is good for developers getting 
started in MCMS.  The only other book out there, by Addison-Wesley, is more 
of a reference.  We wrote the Packt book because there wasn't anything else 
out there like it.

Joel