A Memento of Ideas from Arun Ramdasan

Google Wave

Arun — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:07:00 +0000

What is Google Wave? It is a new communication service that Google unveiled at Google IO this week. It is a product, platform and protocol for communication and collaboration designed for today’s world. Is that too much of technical jargon…let’s make it simple…and take it in chewable bite size…

It is like reinventing email that was designed 40 years ago i.e. many years before internet, wiki, blogs, twitter, forums, discussion boards etc existed. The world has evolved, but we are still hooked to “Store-and-forward” architecture of email systems which mimics snail-mail. In spite of the technological advances, we are living in highly segmented world, with information living on islands – emails, blogs, photo, blogs, micro blogs like twitter, web collaboration, net meetings, IM and so on.

In Google Wave you create a wave (can be an email or IM conversation or a document for collaboration or to publish on a blog or just to play a game) and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. You can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. Google Wave an HTML 5 app, built using Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other desktop functions like drag-and-drop. It has concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. This means Google Wave integrates email, IM and collaborative document creation into a single experience. The most important feature is that you can also use “playback” to rewind the wave to see how it evolved. My elder son was very excited to see that. He said “If I am playing chess with my friends using Wave, I will be able to rewind and replay it to see every move. WoHoooooo..”

Google Wave can also be considered as a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves. The Google Wave protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone’s Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

Vic Gundotra of Microsoft fame is now leading this effort as VP engineering at Google. Lars and Jens Rasmussen (brothers) who came to Google with acquisition of “2 Tech” in 2004, have been driving this effort at Google for more than 18 months. They also have credible history and star reputation at Google as creators of Google Maps.

The underlying assumption is that a large scale disruptive innovation can dislodge the existing leaders and give an opportunity to other to take leading positions. Hence an attempt to create an online world where people can seamlessly communicate and collaborate across various information exchange scenarios including email, IM, blog, wiki and multi-lingual (including translation) . With this bold move, Google is trying to overcome the challenges of integration by hosting the conversation object on the server, allowing multiple channels of interactions and breaking many barriers in the process. The service seems to combine Gmail and Google Docs into an interesting free-form workspace that could be used to write documents collaboratively, plan events, play games or discuss recent news. Google has announced this as an open source project and is publishing all the standards at www.waveprotocol.org The ripples of this Google wave have potential of impacting the technology world for decades to come.

Some helpful links:
Main Site: http://wave.google.com
API: http://code.google.com/apis/wave
Federation Protocol: http://www.waveprotocol.org
Web Toolkit: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit

Arun — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 06:44:00 +0000

What is Microsoft Forefront?
Microsoft Forefront is relatively new and just beginning to get real traction in the network security market.

The first thing is that there is no “Forefront” product. Instead, Forefront is a collection of Microsoft security products. This collection of Forefront security products is referred to as the “Forefront Security Suite”

There are three collections of security products included in the Forefront Security Suite. These include:

Forefront Edge — Forefront Edge products include the Forefront Threat Management Gateway (the next version of ISA Server) and the Forefront Intelligent Access Gateway 2007 (IAG 2007). The next version of IAG will be part of the Forefront Security Suite and the product will be renamed to Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG).
Forefront Server Security — There are three products that comprise the Forefront Server Security collection. These are Forefront Security for Exchange, Forefront Security for SharePoint and Forefront Security for Office Communications Server.
Forefront Client Security — There is one product in this collection — Microsoft Forefront Client Security (FCS).

In the future, there is likely to be another member of the Forefront family of security products, Forefront code-named “Stirling”. Stirling is a comprehensive configuration, management and reporting console that allows you to configure, management and report on the activities of all the members of the Forefront family of security products. In addition, Stirling will allow you to create proactive response policies, so that information gathered from one member of the Forefront Security Suite can be used to trigger a response by other members of the suite. Stirling will enable you to create incident response policies so that corrective actions take place immediately, instead of having to wait for you to receive and alert and implement a response manually. The first version of Stirling will probably only support a subset of Forefront products, which the long term goal being support for all members of the Forefront Security Suite.

Microsoft Forefront Family Products
Forefront family products include security servers that perform a wide range of security functions. Members of the Forefront family include:

Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG). TMG is the next version of ISA Server. In contrast to the .1 upgrade we saw with ISA 2004 to ISA 2006, the TMG is a major rewrite and feature enhanced version of the ISA firewall. Major investments have been made to improve anti-malware and anti-virus scanning for Internet downloads, and the TMG will include site filtering based on category. There are many more features planned for the RTM release of the TMG. In addition, TMG runs only on 64bit Windows Server 2008, so should expect to see major improvements in performance and stability that only a 64bit platform can provide.
Forefront Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 (IAG 2007). The Forefront IAG 2007 is an SSL VPN gateway. IAG 2007 can be used to publish Web servers in traditional reverse Web Proxy fashion, or you can create customized portals that provide users one click access to applications hosted on the corporate network. IAG 2007 portals provide access to both Web and non-Web based applications. Non-Web based applications take advantage of IAG 2007 port and socket forwarding features, so that even complex protocols like Outlook/Exchange MAPI connections will work over an SSL connection. And for users who need full network layer access, IAG 2007 includes the “Network Connector” feature that enables users to establish a full network layer tunnel over an SSL connection. IAG 2007 also includes easy to configure and powerful endpoint detection and information wiping on client computers.
Forefront Server Security for Exchange (FSE), SharePoint (FSS) and Office Communications Server. These three products provide anti-virus and anti-malware protection for Exchange, SharePoint and OCS. These products can be used to scan e-mail or libraries for existing malware, and can be used to configure them to prevent users from uploading malware. Up to 5 anti-virus engines can be used at the same time, and policies configured to use a user-defined mix of engines, depending the level of confidence and performance you desire. In addition, these products allow to configure content filtering rules, so that we can block specific file types or documents containing forbidden strings. Each product has comprehensive logging and reporting features. They are all easy to configure, manage and update. At this time OCS is in beta testing and its full feature set is in flux, but we can expect it to provide similar anti-virus and anti-malware protection as the other products in the Forefront Server Security suite.
Forefront Client Security (FCS). Forefront Client Security is an enterprise grade desktop and server anti-virus and anti-malware platform. Forefront Client Security includes both client and server components. You can use Forefront Client Security to deploy the anti-malware agent too all machines, or selected machines, on the network using Group Policy or any other software distribution mechanism you like. Forefront Client Security scans client and server systems for viruses and malware, and also performs security state assessments that are reported to the Forefront Client Security console. Forefront Client Security can scale from a single server solution, to one that includes a separate servers for the 6 different Forefront Client Security server roles. Using the Forefront Client Security enterprise management console, Forefront Client Security can be configured to support up to 100,000 users.
Forefront “Stirling”. Forefront “Stirling,” is a single product that delivers unified security management and reporting with comprehensive, coordinated protection across an organization’s IT infrastructure. The Stirling console will allow to configure, manage, and receive reporting information from all members of the Forefront Security Suite. In addition to unified management, we will be able to configure Stirling policies that enables creation of proactive incident response policies. Stirling will be able to gather security information from all Forefront products it manages and monitors, and then will be able to use that information to trigger incident response policies that fire off automatically without requiring administrator intervention. In addition to integrating Forefront products, Stirling will also leverage Windows Server 2008 Network Access Protection to isolate compromised machines from the network.

Summary
Microsoft Forefront is a collection of Microsoft security products aimed at protecting the network edge, key server applications including Exchange, SharePoint and OCS, and client and server systems with host-based anti-virus and anti-malware protection. At this time these products work separately and configuration, management and reporting work through different consoles. In the future, with the release of Forefront Stirling, a single console will expose configuration, management and reporting functionality through a single interface.

Silverlight Web Part for Sharepoint

Arun — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:39:00 +0000

In this post, we are going to see integrating the webpart with Silverlight contents on SharePoint Site.

For that, we need to combine all required java script and Xaml files (used to display the Silverlight content) in to single assembly without any dependent files. It makes sense to embed the Xaml and java script file as a resource and reference it in programming using the WebResource.axd handler mechanism for extracting embedded resources.

1. Create a Webpart project and create or add the required java script and Xaml files to the project.
Include some files Silverlight.js, Scene.js and Scene.xaml

2. Set the BuildAction property to “Embedded Resource” in properties window for each java script and Xaml.
This will use to include the files as Resources in an assembly.

3. Add the assembly-level attribute System.Web.UI.WebResource to grant permission for these resources to be served by WebResource.axd and to associate MIME type for the response.

[assembly: WebResource("Arun.Silverlight.js", "text/javascript" )]
[assembly: WebResource("Arun.Scene.js", "text/javascript")]
[assembly: WebResource("Arun.Scene.xaml", "text/xml")]
Now JavaScript and Xaml files are compiled into my assembly as embedded resources.

4. Now, we can use the RegisterClientScriptresource() method of the Page.ClientScriptManager class to rendered the page with the referenced files.

this.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptResource(GetType(), “Arun.Silverlight.js”); this.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptResource(GetType(), “Arun.Scene.js”);

Include the above lines in the PreRender method to register the javascript files for the webpart.

5. Add the following lines to the RenderWebPart method to host the

tag and call the Silverlight content to the webpart,

string strLoad = “Silverlight.createDelegate(scene, scene.handleLoad)”;

output.WriteLine(”

“);

output.WriteLine(“”);

output.WriteLine(“if (!window.Silverlight)”);
output.WriteLine(“window.Silverlight = {};”);
output.WriteLine(“Silverlight.createDelegate = function(instance, method) {“);
output.WriteLine(“return function() {“);
output.WriteLine(“return method.apply(instance, arguments);”);
output.WriteLine(“}}”);
output.WriteLine(“var scene = new Scene();”);

output.WriteLine(“Silverlight.createObjectEx({“);

output.WriteLine(“source: ‘” + this.Page.ClientScript.GetWebResourceUrl(GetType(), “Arun.Scene.xaml”) + “‘,”);

output.WriteLine(“parentElement: document.getElementById(‘” + this.ClientID+”‘),”);
output.WriteLine(“id: ‘” + this.ClientID + “_ctrl’” + “,”);
output.WriteLine(“properties: {width:’100%’, height:’100%’, version:’1.0′ },”);
output.WriteLine(“events:{ onLoad: “+strLoad+”, onError: null },”);
output.WriteLine(“context: null”);
output.WriteLine(“});”);

output.WriteLine(“

“);

The method GetWebResourceUrl(GetType(), “Arun.Scene.xaml”) used to retrieve the Url of the Xaml file from WebResource.axd.

Code Contracts

Arun — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 05:33:00 +0000

Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs. The contracts take the form of preconditions, postconditions, and object invariants. Contracts act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs. The contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification, and documentation generation.

Code Contracts bring the advantages of design-by-contract programming to all .NET programming languages.

The benefits of writing contracts are:

Improved testability

each contract acts as an oracle, giving a test run a pass/fail indication.
automatic testing tools, such as Pex, can take advantage of contracts to generate more meaningful unit tests by filtering out meaningless test arguments that don’t satisfy the pre-conditions.

Static verification tools can takes advantage of contracts to reduce false positives and produce more meaningful errors.

API documentation Our API documentation often lacks useful information. The same contracts used for runtime testing and static verification can also be used to generate better API documentation, such as which parameters need to be non-null, etc.

Using a set of static library methods for writing preconditions, postconditions, and object invariants as well as two tools from Micrsosoft:

ccrewrite, for generating runtime checking from the contracts
cccheck, a static checker that verifies contracts at compile-time.

The plan from Microsoft is to add further tools for

Automatic API documentation generatio
Intellisense integration

The use of a library has the advantage that all .NET languages can immediately take advantage of contracts. There is no need to write a special parser or compiler. Furthermore, the respective language compilers naturally check the contracts for well-formedness (type checking and name resolution) and produce a compiled form of the contracts as MSIL. Authoring contracts in Visual Studio allows programmers to take advantage of the standard intellisense provided by the language services. Previous approaches based on .NET attributes fall far short as they neither provide an expressive enough medium, nor can they take advantage of compile-time checks.

Contracts are expressed using static method calls at method entries. Tools take care to interpret these declarative contracts in the right places. These methods are found in the System.Diagnostics.Contracts namespace.
• Contract.Requires takes a boolean condition and expresses a precondition of the method. A precondition must be true on entry to the method. It is the caller’s responsibility to make sure the pre-condition is met.
• Contract.Ensures takes a boolean condition and expresses a postcondition of the method. A postcondition must be true at all normal exit points of the method. It is the implementation’s responsibility that the postcondition is met.

Watch this space for more developments in this area.

Source: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/contracts/

Cloud Computing through the lens of SOA

Arun — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:37:00 +0000

Cloud computing is a style of computing that defines the way IT functions are going to be delivered or acquired in the future. This can essentially be contributed due to the emergence of revolutionary technologies such as Virtualization, Service oriented Architecture and the Web.

I will attempt to explain the influence of these technologies on the formation of the “Cloud”.Let me do this by first highlighting some key attributes that basically characterizes the “Cloud”. Followed by, describing how these emerging technologies meet to address them.

ABC’s of the “Cloud”:
Adapt: Being scalable and elastic to meet fluctuating resource demands
Black-Boxed: Delivery of capabilities “as a service”
Focus is on the Results and Not on Components
Delivery Service Levels are Critical
Commune: Anyone Anywhere Anytime access
The amalgamation of Virtualization, Service oriented Architectures based on open standards along with the pervasive nature of the Internet has made IT services generally available at global scales. Now let’s look at how these technologies principally function to meet the ABC’s of the cloud:

Virtualization:
Virtualization technologies such as Hyper-V, VMware, Citrix have de-coupled software from the hardware making it possible to run multiple software instances on a single hardware. The technology allows IT administrators to seamlessly Ramp up/down computational capabilities such as processor, storage, RAM in a matter of hours or even minutes. Virtualization has enabled efficient use of shared resources along with the de-coupling increasing the economies of scale of computing.

Services:
“Functionality being delivered through a platform independent contract” is the key design principle behind service oriented application. This makes service consumers consume information by being de-coupled from the technical implementation of the provider and focus only on the results. Also being self contained, services can be designed or managed at a unit level hence allowing for more granular control of service levels.

Web:
The global pervasiveness and the open standards of the Internet have made this technology as the de-facto mode of delivering IT-services on the public cloud. Although one may also argue that in case of private clouds, say within an enterprise, the use of private networks may enable cloud-style environments delivery capabilities without ever using Internet technologies. However from a universal accessibility stand-point the access over such channels may be confined to that within the enterprise boundaries limiting the openness otherwise observed on the cloud.

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing – Joel on Software

Arun — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:41:00 +0000

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing – Joel on Software

Really cool. In true Joel style…

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code – Joel on Software

Arun — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:34:00 +0000

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code – Joel on Software

Any enterprise programmer worth his salt must read this. Period.

BizTalk 2006 Code Samples

Arun — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:15:00 +0000

This news is a little old now, but there are a whole heap of BizTalk Server Code samples that were released to MSDN back in June 06.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/biztalk/downloads/samples/
Take a look at this list:

Publishing and Consuming Web Services with SOAP HeadersThis sample demonstrates how to publish a BizTalk orchestration as a Web service with a SOAP header and how to consume the SOAP header from a Web service request message.

BAM and HAT CorrelationThis sample demonstrates how to use the enhanced BAM features, and how to customize BAM and HAT integration. This sample also includes a Windows Forms application customizing BAM and HAT integration for the sample BizTalk solution.

Consuming Web Services with Array ParametersThis sample demonstrates how to consume Web services with array parameters.

Extending the BizTalk Server Administration ConsoleThis sample demonstrates how to use the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK) to extend the functionality of the BizTalk Server Administration console with your own custom menu items, node items, new data items and views, or different views of existing data.

Viewing Failed Tracking DataThis sample uses Windows Forms to provide a simple interface to view and resubmit failed messages.

Inserting XML Nodes from Business RulesThis sample demonstrates how to insert nodes into an XML document and set their values from a business rule by using the XmlHelper class.

Using the Mass Copy FunctoidThis sample demonstrates the use of the Mass Copy Functoid to map a source hierarchy to a destination hierarchy without mapping each individual element by hand.

Using Role LinksThis sample demonstrates how to use role links and parties.

Split File PipelineThis sample uses the FILE adapter to accept an input file containing multiple lines of text into a receive location.

Using Enterprise Library 2.0 with BizTalk ServerThis sample demonstrates how to use Enterprise Library 2.0 with BizTalk Server.

Consuming Web ServicesThis sample demonstrates how to consume Web services in a messaging-only scenario, and without using the Add Web Reference option.

Console AdapterThis sample consists of a C# console application that instantiates and hosts an instance of the receive adapter. The adapter is a Visual Studio 2005 class library that invokes the BizTalk Server 2006 APIs.

Delivery NotificationThis sample demonstrates how acknowledgments work and how to use delivery notification.

Using Long-Running Transactions in Orchestrations This sample demonstrates how to use long-running transactions in orchestrations.

Using the Looping FunctoidThis sample transforms catalog data from one format to another by using the Looping functoid.

Mapping to a Repeating StructureThis sample demonstrates how to map multiple recurring records in an inbound message to their corresponding records in the outbound message in the BizTalk Mapper.

Parallel Convoy This sample demonstrates how to design the parallel convoy pattern in BizTalk Orchestration Designer.

Policy ChainingThis sample demonstrates how to invoke a policy from another policy by calling the Execute method of the Policy class exposed directly by the Microsoft.RuleEngine assembly.

Recoverable Interchange Processing Using Pipelines This sample demonstrates how to implement recoverable interchange processing.

Using the Table Looping Functoid This sample demonstrates the use of the Table Looping functoid in gated and non-gated configurations.

Using the Value Mapping and Value Mapping (Flattening) FunctoidsThis sample demonstrates the use of the Value Mapping and Value Mapping (Flattening) functoids to transform data between different message formats.

Direct Binding to an OrchestrationThis sample processes fictitious loan requests using orchestrations with ports that are directly bound to another orchestration

Direct Binding to the MessageBox Database in Orchestrations This sample processes fictitious loan requests using orchestrations with ports that are directly bound to the MessageBox database.

Using a Custom .NET Type for a Message in OrchestrationsThis sample processes fictitious
customer satisfaction survey responses from clients who spend time at different resort properties. Clients assign an overall satisfaction rating and can optionally enter a contact address and request a personal response. A request for a personal response generates a new message that is forwarded to a customer service application for tracking and follow-up.

Writing Orchestration Information as XML Using the ExplorerOM APIThe sample performs two tasks. First, it writes configuration information for all orchestrations defined for a BizTalk server into a user-specified XML file. It then optionally transforms the XML data into a simple HTML report. This is accomplished through a console application.

Correlating Messages with Orchestration InstancesThis sample receives a purchase order (PO) message from a fictitious customer and processes the purchase order message using correlation.

SSO as Configuration StoreThis sample provides an implementation of a sample class and a walkthrough that demonstrates how to use the SSO administrative utility and the SSOApplicationConfig command-line tool.

Atomic Transactions with COM+ Serviced Components in OrchestrationsThis sample demonstrates how atomic transactions work in orchestrations.

Exception Handling in OrchestrationsThis sample demonstrates how to handle exceptions in an orchestration.

Implementing Scatter and Gather PatternThis sample demonstrates how to implement the Scatter and Gather pattern using BizTalk Orchestration Designer.

Using the SQL Adapter with Atomic Transactions in OrchestrationsThis sample shows how to use the SQL adapter with atomic transactions to keep databases consistent.

Custom Alerts in SharePoint 2007

Arun — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 05:02:00 +0000

In SharePoint 2007 we have a great feature called Alerts, basically it sends an email when something in a list or library (or view) is changed. I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone about them, but when it comes to actually applying them, it would be ideal to be able to customise the alerts for your own application.

So not only might you want to change the presentation of the email that you send as an alert, but you may also want set certain custom conditions for when an alert is triggered.
The alert template xml file is located in the 12 Hive at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML\alerttemplates.xml, if you open the file you will see all the different alerts for each type of list/library.

Either make a backup of the original file, or create your own copy (we will register the alert file later) and rename the file eg. CustomAlertTempates.xml
Copy the GenericList node and paste below the other nodes and rename.

If you expand this node you will see the child nodes EventTypes, Format (Digest & Immediate), Properties, and Filters.

If we look at the Format Node first, there are two types of formatting available, Digest and Immediate. Each contains a large amount of xsl/html that controls the output html of the alert email. The digest node controls the daily/weekly summary alerts, and the immediate node controls the alerts sent immediately (obviously!).
Change some of the html in the Immediate node so you can test whether the alert is using your template, eg.

The next step is to register and test your new alert type. For this you use STSADM from the command prompt to register the new alert file for a particular Site Collection.

stsadm -o updatealerttemplates -url http://yoursite/sites/sitecollname -filename “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML\CustomeAlertTemplates.xml”

Now to set a particular alert to use your new specific template, you can set the AlertTemplate for the list programmatically.

SPList spList = null;
spList = spWeb.Lists[listName];
SPAlertTemplate newTemplate = new SPAlertTemplate();
newTemplate.Name = “SPAlertTemplateType.MyCustomAlertType“;
spList.AlertTemplate = newTemplate;spList.Update();
Or you can create an individual alert programmatically…
SPAlert spAlert = spUser.Alerts.Add();
spAlert.Title = alertName;
spAlert.EventType = SPEventType.Modify;
spAlert.AlertFrequency = SPAlertFrequency.Immediate;
spAlert.AlertType = SPAlertType.List;
spAlert.List = spWeb.Lists[listName];
spAlert.Filter = QueryBuilder(spUser.Name);
SPAlertTemplate newTemplate = new SPAlertTemplate();
newTemplate.Name = “SPAlertTemplateType.MyCustomAlertType“;
spAlert.AlertTemplate = newTemplate;

Once this has been registered, recycle the web app application pool, or reset IIS, then test the new alert. You should find the email alert will now include your new HTML.
So that’s how to change the HTML of an alert, in the next post I’ll create a new custom filtering option that will appear through the UI.

TIP: By default the timer job that runs the alert jobs runs every 5 minutes. And if you’re debugging that can be a painfully slow process, unless you enjoy heaps of coffee breaks! Anyway I decided I didn’t need that much coffee, so I changed the alert timer job to run every minute instead of every five.

SPJobDefinitionCollection spJobs = SpWeb.Site.WebApplication.JobDefinitions;
foreach (SPJobDefinition job in spJobs)
{
if (job.Id.ToString() == TaskGuid)
{
string guid = job.Id.ToString();
string name = job.DisplayName;
SPMinuteSchedule newSchedule = new SPMinuteSchedule();
newSchedule.BeginSecond = 0;
newSchedule.EndSecond = 59;
newSchedule.Interval = minutes;
job.Schedule = newSchedule;
job.Update();
}
}

Web Content Management

Arun — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:56:00 +0000

Web Content Management or WCM in short is one of the more interesting topics on MOSS. This blog aims to provide an overview of WCM, explain what is WCM, why is it special and more importantly, how is it useful for you.

So what is WCM in simple terms ?
WCM is a rich content authoring and management platform. It provides a set of controls and publishing features that allow the site owners to host content centric sites. It takes care of the site branding, publishing, content authoring, workflows etc. WCM forms a part of the Enterprise content management solution, which in turn forms a part of MOSS 2007. It also leverages the Office Word and Infopath.

In short it is a very scalable solution that separates the content and presentation, relieving the burden on the IT department.To better understand the solution that WCM provides, we need to understand the problem first.

Managing a content centric web site is by no means a simple task. In most of the organization, it will be the IT team that will have access to add new pages, maintain the pages and keep the site running smoothly. The content contributor has to undergo the overhead of approaching the IT staff for each and every change. This translates to longer process and higher cost of operation. Many a times the content will have to be edited a few times before it is correctly published.

This is where WCM comes into picture. WCM provides a platform. It defines the site branding, sets the templates, look and feel, authoring rules, publishing rules, workflows, various levels of securities etc.

The content contributor can now focus on his content alone and leave the development hassles aside. He simply submits his data. This will in turn validate the data, start the workflows, approval cycles and finally publish the content without the support of IT staff. The final content will be published in accordance with the look and feel of the rest of the site.
WCM incorporates all features in Microsoft content management server 2002 (MCMS). Microsoft has discontinued providing CMS as a separate product, but instead, it provides the enhanced version ( WCM ) along with MOSS 2007.

Some of the important features of the WCM are listed below.

Workflows
Search functionality

RSS facilities

Built in Caching mechanism

Supports multiple devices

Better Versioning mechanism

More events captured

Pluggable Authentication

Reusable Content

Web based management

Having said all this, Does this really make sense?
A content heavy web site will have frequent changes. New pages will be added by various contributors. Managing the new pages, recording the version history, validating data, format etc is a mammoth task. Creating a application to handle the same will cost a fortune. WCM automates most of the processes and brings the focus to what matters the most, the content. This way, the contributor will be able to focus more on the data and be able to publish the content in a quick efficient manner.
The process does not require support from the IT department as the contributor can himself manage the content online. Thus saving a lot of effort as well as money.
In short, WCM saves Time and Money. And that makes a lot of sense.