Publishing content to another farm in SharePoint 2013

Question

We have 2 farms. (1:Internal users ; 2:External Clients).

Internal users will author excel files on their own farm and then should be able to publish them to the other farm.

I am completely new to publishing concept and would like to know if there is any article on the same. Can anyone explain me the concept of publishing? (Whether it is publishing content or pages?)

Also it would be helpful to get answer to foll. (yes/no):

1. Is this scenario possible?

2. Any reference articles?

3. Is publishing site template same as activating publishing feature on team site template?
   (Example: Publishing site template will make all pages as publishing pages? and activating publishing on team site template also make it publishing page?)

4. Is publishing page and publishing site template the same thing?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you would like to publish certain content, like Excel files, I would recommend you to look into the Send to functionality. Select a file in the list and choose the send to action in the File ribbon. Enter the url of a document library in your second farm and away you go. You can also choose to predefine a Send to destination in the library settings of the list.

There are other tools as well, for other types of information. Like cross site publishing.

1. Yes, more or less.
2. There are several articles on the Internet about send to, with or without a records center.
3. It’s not quite that simple. Activating the publishing feature will not “transform” pages on the team site into publishing pages. The best thing is to select the proper template from the beginning (team site or publishing site etc). However- if you really need to transform a team site into a publishing site you can, but it will require a bit more from you than activating the publishing feature.
4. No. A site (or web?) is the "box". You can use it to store and host all sorts of information. Among this several (many) publishing pages. A site template is a predefined "box" with certain settings and other things.

Answer 2

I'm not sure if you really need a complete new farm for this functionality. These are quite complex installations to configure and maintain.

SharePoint has many publishing features. Depending on the requirements you might prefer one solution over the other. You can feed content to external users by using the search, workflows, cross site publishing, etc...

1. yes, there are ways to separate content and publish certain content to a new site / farm. Look into cross site publishin or content deployment (SP2010)

2. Cross site publishing:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/jj872721.aspx http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/07/17/changes-to-content-deployment-in-sharepoint-server-2013.aspx

WCM

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35592&ocid=aff-n-we-loc--ITPRO40936&WT.mc_id=aff-n-we-loc--ITPRO40936

3 Yes, a publishing site has extra features activated by default. The most obvious one is the "publishing feature". There are some other features activated as well.

4 A publishing site is a site containing n amount of publishing pages. You can have 100's of publishing pages in one site. A "publishing site template" is a template on which your (new) site is based. You only encounter the templates when you create a new site. After a site is created based upon a "Publishing Site template" it becomes a "Publishing Site"