SharePoint 2013 – Cross Site Publishing

What is Cross-Site Publishing?

Cross-Site Publishing  is the process of show the content from authoring Site Collection  and display that content in publishing site. Where content exists in authoring site collection and content displayed on publishing site collection.

NOTE:  To make Team Site as publishing site,  do the following.

You can activate two features on team site:

1. SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure (site collection scope)

1. SharePoint Server Publishing (web scope)

Why Cross-Site Publishing?

The Cross-Site Publishing feature is introduced in SharePoint 2013.The  Concept of  CSP(Cross Site Publishing) is, if we have one or more authoring site collections (stored content) and one or more publishing site collections to show authoring site collections content. This approach is called as Cross-Site Publishing. Authoring site collections contains content such as lists, libraries, catalogs and this content is tagged with metadata. These catalogs are indexed by search system (at the time of performing crawl, this crawl will be  full, incremental or continuous crawl) and made available to the publishing site collection. Using search webparts  we had to retrieve the content from authoring site collection to publishing site collection.

Implementation of Cross-Site Publishing

Create at least two site collections – authoring site collection called ‘Authoring’ where content exists and publishing site collection called ‘publishing’ where content will be published.

Turn on Cross Site Collection Publishing(XSP) feature on authoring site collection.

Make sure that you are a site collection administrator on the site collection which contains the list/library.

On the top-level site of the site collection,

Go to Settings -> Site Settings.

On the Site Settings page, in the Site Collection Administration section, select Site Collection Features.

On the Site Collection Features page, next to Cross-Site Collection Publishing, Select Activate.

Activate Cross Site Publishing feature on authoring site collection

To enable a list/library as a catalog, follow these steps.

Open the site, which has lists/libraries for make it as catalog content.

On the top-level site of the site collection

Go to Settings -> Site Contents

On Site Contents Page, Browse for the specific library for make it as catalog.

Under List tab, Go to List Settings and click on Catalog Settings.

On the Catalog Settings page, in the Catalog Sharing section, select Enable this library as a catalog check box.

In the Catalog Item URL Fields section, in the Available fields box, select only the ID field that uniquely identify an item in the library or list for URL navigation, and then click Add.

Now, Catalog Settings for list/library is set.

After these catalog settings for lists/libraries,

We had to to do a FULL/ INCREMENTAL/CONTINUOUS CRAWL.

NOTE:- If for any list/library “Make this library as a catalog” option is disable, then go to Advanced Settings page, and then in search section, change it to Yes.

To perform a Crawl, follow these steps

Go to SharePoint Central Administration, and then select Application Management.

Under Application Management section, In the Service Applications, Select Manage service Applications.

In Service Applications Page, Click on “Search Service Application” in the Column “Type”.

In the Search Administration, on left hand side, Under Crawling Section,

Select “Content Sources”

On the content sources page, “Local SharePoint Sites” Content source is there. If you are to started full crawl then, click on “Start Full Crawl”/”Incremental Crawl”.

Once the Full Crawl is done on the search content source then we can see the catalog setting enabled list into Managed catalog Connection settings of the site collection.

Now, we can implement Cross - Site Collection by do the following.

Go to Publishing Site Collection, Under site settings -> Managed catalog connection.

Now, Click on Manage Catalog Connections[Site Settings -> Catalog Connections] . All available catalogs will be listed here. Click on ‘connect’ next to the catalog you want to publish.

Configure the connection details. Select the tagging field, choose navigation settings and fields to be included in the URL.

Add a web part page in Pages library or any other library and insert a Content Search web part. Configure it to display contents from the shared catalog(with catalog URL).

Links and downloads:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/02/20/stage-1-create-site-collections-for-cross-site-publishing.aspx

About the author:

Milind Bibodi is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at milind.b@spluspl.com