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Transitioning to a New CMS: Differences Between SharePoint & Cascade CMS

School of Medicine websites are transitioning from SharePoint 2016 Content Management System (CMS) to the campus CMS, Cascade, on a rolling basis beginning 2021 through 2023. 

Key Differences Between the 2 CMS Systems

SharePoint CMS

Cascade CMS

New Section

Referred to as 'subsites.'

To create a section of your website with pages underneath, you need to create a subsite.

Referred to as 'folders.'

To create a new section of your website, you need to create a new folder.

Site Permissions

Able to limit user permissions at the 'subsite' level.

For example, we can limit permissions to someone's lab subsite within a department site in SharePoint.

Permissions can not be limited to a section of a website, i.e. permissions cannot be applied at the folder level in Cascade.

Editors are granted access to view and edit the entire department website. However, we can grant staging-only access so a user is only able to publish to the 'Staging' site, not the 'Delivery' (live) site.

Publishing Destination

There is only one destination to publish your content. The SharePoint edit environment is not public.

There are two destinations where you can publish your pages: 'Staging' and 'Delivery' (live).

  • Staging is similar to the SharePoint edit environment — it is not public and you have to be on the campus network or allthruucsd VPN. Publish to stage if you want to show a page to leadership or a colleague for review before it goes live.
  • Delivery is public so only select this option when you are ready for a page to go live.

Publishing Settings

 Not applicable.

You need to change the publish settings in Cascade if you are not ready for a page to go live yet. 

If you are editing an existing page, uncheck:

  • Include when publishing — You can submit a version of the page without publishing, but make sure you disable publishing if you don’t want a page to go live yet. This step is especially important if you are a smaller unit within a department website, because the department may need to publish the entire site at any time.

If you are creating a new page, also uncheck:

  • Include when indexing — But ONLY if you are NOT ready for a new page to be published (selecting this for an existing page will cause it to disappear from the navigation).

Unpublish

 Not applicable.

If you accidentally publish a page in Cascade, you can easily unpublish.