The difference between Team site and Publishing site

The real question here is what does Publishing have more than a Team site? First of all, Publishing is a set of two features, one at the Site Collection level and one at the Site level. You can activate them on any site. You will find all the info on what publishing adds in that link, but here I want to showcase some reasons why I use Publishing for my clients.
ref: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff628963(v=office.14).aspx

Some Features

The Team site has the classic default list:

Figure 1 :  Team site lists

It also has plenty of document and page libraries. This kind of site is ready to work on for a team. Usually, a team has the same rights for adding and modifying content.

Now, if we edit the main page, we clearly see that we are in a wiki page. This is a big difference between both templates. Where a Team site has a couple of text layouts, Publishing site have much more complex page layouts.

Figure 2 : Publishing site Page layouts

The main aspect of a page layout is the ability to create custom ones and include metadata inside the gray area. This practice is easily understood by the contributor who can add the proper metadata to the page. With our client, we often create a Content page layout with basic metadata and a News page layout where there is more metadata like being a Top News or explicit publishing dates.

Another cool feature of Publishing is the Simple moderation.

Figure 3 : Simple Moderation of the Publishing site

Simple moderation consists of the yellow bar, which gives us the page status (draft, checked out, approved, etc.). The Submit/Schedule buttons gives us the options to set the page as ready to be published where approvers can review the page before publishing it.

Because of those multiple page statuses, sometimes we need to know when a link on a page points to an unpublished page. To help, we have this little button called Draft Check.

Figure 4 : The Draft Check feature in the Publishing site

Once the check is done, we see the unpublished page in orange (1). If we want more detail, we click on the full report link in the notification (2). This will open a small report as a popup, where there is a table formatted list of versions of unpublished pages. This turns out to be very useful on a Home page of a portal site. We can quickly check if the visitor can see the latest version for all pages.

We can see that the publishing features are there to create web sites. It’s built around the needs of content creation and approval. Now, what about easing the work of publishing?

Migrating Publishing Content

I use Sharegate in all my publishing projects simply because it’s faster. Faster, means less expensive for my clients. In the multiple scenario that made my life easier, the bulk edition must be my favorite.

Figure 5 : Sharegate – Mass Check In

As a power user and contributor, you can mass check in multiple pages at the same time. We can see the status in the Page library.

Figure 6 : Pages approval status

The Administrator can also mass approve those pages using the Content approval status.

Figure 7 : Sharegate – Mass approved

Finally, you can easily migrate those pages using Sharegate. I even use the mapping option to migrate content from Team sites to Publishing. All I have to do is map the content of the wiki page in the Team site with the Page Content field in the Publishing page layouts.