August 2015 – Luis Carrazana's Blog

Introduction

Cross-Site Publishing (also known as Product Catalog) is a SharePoint Server 2013 feature that allows to use one or more site collections to author content, and one or more site collections to control the design of the site and the display of the content. See: Plan for cross-site publishing in Sharepoint Server 2013.

cross-site-publishing

This is a great feature that addresses some of the limitations of the traditional publishing, where content is only available in one site collection. One of the great benefits is the ability to author content in one place and have multiple site collections acting as presentation layers, even in a different web application. However, in a real case scenario, there are usually many requirements involved, other than simply showing read-only data to end users. In most case there is need for certain level of interaction, allowing users to rate content, submit feedback, etc.

The purpose of the table below is to compare the Traditional Publishing and Cross-Site Publishing methods, and to illustrate some of the out-of-the-box features that are available for each one. This could be useful during the analysis phase to determine what can be accomplished with purely configuration, and what areas will required custom coding.

Traditional Publishing vs Cross-Site Publishing (Product Catalog)

Out-of-the-Box features	Traditional Publishing	Cross-Site Publishing
Rich Edit capability for authoring content
Content Approval Workflow
Content is available to other site collections and farms.
Managed Navigation
Article feedback capability
Rating capability
Related content with Summary Links
Related content with Lookup fields (multiple)
Related content with third-party controls
Reusable Content with Automatic Update
Related content with Item-Catalog URL fields
User-friendly URL for category pages
User-friendly URL for article pages
Search-Driven Content
Custom Search Refiners
Custom Search Results
Custom Search Previews
Search Analytics Reports
Custom message for No Search Results
Display Selected Search Refiners on Top

Note: This list was created based on a particular project scope, and it doesn’t include all available features.

Summary

Cross-Site Publishing was a great addition to the SharePoint 2013 feature set and it extends the range of possible architectures for content publishing scenarios. The purpose of this post is to provide a brief analysis on what built-in capabilities are available and what customizations will be required, so the solution can be planned accordingly.