MOSS 2007 supports Live Earth – Conservation International’s Public Web Sites – How We Did It (Part 1 of 2)
When the Live Earth 24-hour, 7-continent concert series happened about a month ago, I was very happy to learn that Conservation International's (CI) web sites had launched to coincide with the event, and they were powered by MOSS 2007! CI is a U.S. based international organization that applies innovations in science, economics, policy, and community participation to protect the Earth's richest regions of plant and animal diversity. CI initiated the project with Microsoft to migrate all of their existing web site content to SharePoint, and Portal Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, entered into the project as the main technical contractor to implement the solution. This part 1 of a two-part series involves the work of two teams: one from Portal Solutions and the other from Applied Information Sciences, also a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.
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Overview
The main aim of the project was to migrate and consolidate all existing web site content, which was in multiple languages and dispersed across several different web domain names, to a common SharePoint server farm. The initial driving force behind the project's inception was the Live Earth concert series on July 7, 2007 – Microsoft was a major sponsor and had big plans to link traffic from MSN's Live Earth web site to Conservation.org. About three months prior to the Live Earth event, it was apparent that migration of all CI content would prove challenging, so the project scope changed to launch a promotional, or "gateway" site for Conservation International (see screenshot below), which would be both visually appealing and content rich to attract viewers sourced from the MSN site.
Although the long term plan was to invest in SharePoint technology to implement a Web Content Management (WCM) solution, the promotional site would require plenty of professional user experience design, so Atmosphere BBDO – a design company based in New York City – became a key member of the project.
The user experience design of the Conservation.org web site turned out to be quite radical compared to SharePoint's default look and feel, so it required some significant custom development on top of the SharePoint platform. These technology components included customized components that called on the SharePoint object model API, a Silverlight-based Carbon Calculator application (implemented by Applied Information Sciences), Flash-based user interface components, and a number of ASP.NET 2.0-based provider components for specialist membership authentication and XML content services.
The BiodiversityHotspots.org Web Site
The Live Earth event featured conservation of the Earth's endangered regions, to which are more commonly referred by Conservation International as "hotspots." The Biodiversity Hotspots web site contains details about many of the hotspots and endangered species spread across the globe, and so it was imperative that Portal Solutions migrated the content from this web site to SharePoint before the event.
With the exception of a single dynamic application, all of the Biodiversity Hotspots web site's existing content was maintained in a legacy content management system. MOSS 2007 now includes Web Content Management functionality out of the box, so the Portal Solution team leveraged this capability to produce a near identical copy of the legacy site and used Migration Manager – a content migration tool from Metalogix - to transport the existing content to SharePoint.
Portal Solutions implemented the site banner, including some of the navigation areas, and site footer within a Master Page, which is stored in the site's Master Page Gallery. The pages themselves were based on a handful of page templates that were designed to support the same page layout of the web pages on the legacy site. Since the existing content were stored in well-formed XML format within the legacy content management system, using the Migration Manager tool to query content sections simply involved the construction of XPATH queries. Having transported a small subset of pages and tweaking page layouts, Migration Manager handled to bulk of the site pages automatically.
The Conservation.org Web Site
The following diagram illustrates most of the modular components involved in the implementation of the Conservation.org web site and their interaction with the SharePoint platform.
At the heart of the solution is ASP.NET 2.0. Since SharePoint 2007 now builds upon this technology layer entirely, Portal Solutions engineers were able to build custom components, handlers, modules, and services around the SharePoint platform, mixing calls to the SharePoint object model when requiring access to dynamic content.
User Interface
MOSS 2007 is the backbone of the solution, providing metadata via lists and custom content types. This metadata drives the user interface and allows CI content managers to tweak wording, graphics, audio, and occasional behavior of the user experience. SharePoint also provides backend support for the Silverlight-based Ccarbon Calculator. Silverlight, like its Flash counterpart, operates within the client browser, so access to server data within SharePoint involved exposing this data via secure web services.
Conservation International chose to implement the main UI for the promotional site as Flash, which consists of a main shell SWF file and sibling SWF files for various pages. As the project marches on into the future, this design will likely change in that content for the web site will reside in page document libraries based on page content types as part of the organization's longer term SharePoint-based WCM strategy.
The XML Data Service is an HTTP Handler that injects dynamic data into the Flash-based user interface by exposing metadata contained in SharePoint lists as XML in a schema designated by Atmosphere BBDO Flash developers. The XML Data Service handler was designed to support multiple site label variations to accommodate CI's need to have multilingual content in the future.
In the near future, Conservation International will begin migrating all legacy content to SharePoint, and while the migration is progressing, the new web site would need a mechanism to handle legacy links (on search engines and in people's browser bookmarks) without returning 404 errors. The URL redirection module, which exists as an ASP.NET HTTP module, implements this functionality by querying the SharePoint object model for valid pages/lists, and for those pages not found on the new platform, redirecting to a separate web site that hosts the legacy content.
Authentication
Occasionally, Conservation International likes to run sweepstakes promotions for US-based residents. Portal Solutions implemented a high performance "Binary Tree" algorithm to lookup IP addresses in published ISO lists to determine the country location of the requesting IP address. The IP2Country HTTP module is responsible for hosting this algorithm as well as downloading updates from published FTP servers and then caching the lists of IP address-to-country mappings for fast lookup.
During the envision stage of the project, Conservation International had stipulated that support for new donation forms, sweepstakes, and user subscriptions be maintained by their current partner – Convio. One challenge with this requirement is maintaining user profile updates and synchronizing them with SharePoint profiles. The workflow requirements stipulated that a new user signs up using a form on the web site and checks a checkbox to subscribe to Conservation International. This user will also gain access to SharePoint as a registered user for future collaborative features, such as user forums. Since SharePoint maintains user profiles and user authentication, different to that of Convio's web site, which is primarily used for newsletter subscriptions and donations, Portal Solutions developed the custom membership provider, built using the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership provider model, which authenticates users against the user credential store at Convio. This effectively provided single sign-on for the registered users and alleviated the need to synchronize account/profile information. If a user changes their password in the Convio system, he or she can still access their account in SharePoint using the same credentials.
The "Donate" Functionality
Both the Flash-based components and the Silverlight-based Carbon Calculator implement the donate functionality. Rather than developing an interface to Convio on these different technologies, Portal Solutions built the Convio Web Service as a centralized service for user data submission and authentication against the Convio web site. If Conservation International should later wish to change from Convio to another subscriptions management provider, only the web service will need to be changed.
Vanity URLs
An additional component that's not depicted on the diagram above is the "vanity URL controller" module, which is implemented as an custom ASP.NET HTTP module and provides friendly URLs to deep links on the web site. Deep linking to pages within the Flash-based components requires the appendage of query string parameters to the requesting page URL. These parameters are hard to remember and not intuitive for users. The vanity URL controller maps requested friendly URLs to real URLs understood by SharePoint.
Summary
Now that the Live Earth event has passed and the various organizations involved in phase 1.0 of the project have celebrated the successful launch of the web sites, we look forward to working through phase 2.0 and beyond. As CI continues to embrace Microsoft technologies as an early adopter customer and leverages the SharePoint platform for web content management and other capabilities, visitors to Conservation.org and other web sites under the Conservation International umbrella can expect to see some impressive enhancements in the near future. In part 2 of this blog series, we will focus on the work that Applied Information Sciences did in the development of the Silverlight-based Carbon Calculator applet hosted within the http://www.biodiversityhotspots.org web site.
The Conservation International Team at Portal Solutions
The Conservation International Team at Microsoft
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