We’ve been hearing from some of you at conferences and in email that you want to be able to take TechNet content offline on your e-readers (Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, and so on). We’re starting to figure out how to do that, and we’d love more input.

Please leave a comment about which e-reader you use and what content you’d most like to read on an e-reader.

If you’re looking for something to read offline immediately, here are some resources.

CHMs updated monthly

These compiled help files won’t work on your e-reader, but any computer running Windows should be able to open them. After you download a .chm file, you don’t have to be connected to the Internet to read the content. (If you open the .chm file and see no content, unblock the .chm file as described in this KB article.)

• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
• Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010
• Also available for Microsoft Search Server 2010, Microsoft FAST Search for SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Project Server 2010, Microsoft Groove Server 2010, and Microsoft Office 2010

Downloadable books

These books are compilations of TechNet library articles in .doc, .pdf, and .xps format. Most e-readers can open .pdf files – just connect your Barnes & Noble Nook or Sony Reader (video) to your computer to transfer a .pdf file. If you use an Amazon Kindle, you can send .doc files to your Kindle.

• List for SharePoint Server
• List for SharePoint Foundation
• Also available for FAST Search for SharePoint, Search Server, Project Server, and Office 2010

In this series of "how to's" blog posts I'll describe how you can use SharePoint Server 2013 to set up a website that is based on product catalog data. I'll show you how to use the cross-site publishing feature, and how you can use SharePoint search features to influence how product data is displayed to visitors on a site. I'll use data from a fictitious company called "Contoso" to show how it all comes together. Contoso is a manufacturer and retailer of technology products and home appliances, and they want to set up a website that focuses on product-centric experiences.

To give you an idea of what we'll be doing, here's a couple of screenshots of what our Contoso website will look like once we're done.

IMPORTANT: The Contoso Electronics material that I'll use throughout this series isn't available for download.

Throughout the next weeks, I'll be publishing individual posts. The targeted publication dates are listed below. I'll add links to the posts as they go live.
Note: most of features described in this series are not available in SharePoint 2013 online.

Blog posts in this series:

• An introduction to cross-site publishing.
• Stage 1: Create site collections for cross-site publishing.
• Stage 2: Import list content into the Product Catalog Site Collection.
• Stage 3: How to enable a list as a catalog.
• Stage 4: Set up search and enable crawling of your catalog content.
• From site column to managed property - What's up with that?
• Stage 5: Connect your publishing site to a catalog.
• Stage 6: Upload and apply a new master page to a publishing site
• Stage 7: Upload page layouts and create new pages in a publishing site
• Stage 8: Assign a category page and a catalog item page to a term
• Stage 9: Configure the query in a Content Search Web Part on a category page
• Stage 10: Configure the query in a Content Search Web Part on a catalog item page
• Stage 11: Upload and apply display templates to the Content Search Web Part
• Stage 12: Plan to use refiners for faceted navigation - Part I
• Stage 13: Plan to use refiners for faceted navigation - Part II
• Stage 14: Configure refiners for faceted navigation
• Stage 15: Add refiners for faceted navigation to a publishing site
• Stage 16: Add a Taxonomy Refinement Panel Web Part to a publishing site

You can read more about cross-site publishing on the TechNet scenario page Create SharePoint sites by using cross-site publishing.

This is a blog post in the series "How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013."  In this series, I'll use data from a fictitious company called "Contoso" to show you how to use search features to set up a website based on product catalog data.
Note: Most of the features described in this series are not available in SharePoint 2013 Online.

For an overview of the blog posts in this series, go to How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013.

Start stage 2

Once you've set up your Product Catalog Site Collection, as described in Stage 1: Create site collections for cross-site publishing, we'll import content into this site collection. To do this, we'll use PowerShell scripts. Before we start, let's take a look at what's automatically created in a Product Catalog Site Collection.

In our newly created Product Catalog Site Collection, you can see a default list template named Products.

 The Products list contains a managed metadata site column named Item Category.

The Item Category site column is associated with the term set named Product Hierarchy.

To import list content into the Product list, we'll use PowerShell scripts that will:

• Add content to the Products list.
• Add terms to the Product Hierarchy term set.
• Associate each item in the Products list with the correct term from the Product Hierarchy term set, and display this in the Item Category column in the Products list.

Before we can run the PowerShell scripts, we'll need to prepare the following:

• A list of the site columns we want to add to the Products list.
• A tab delimited text file containing the content you want to add to the Products list.
• A tab delimited text file containing the taxonomy to be added to the Product Hierarchy term set.

The PowerShell scripts, instructions on how to create the tab delimited text files, and how to modify and use the import scripts so that it fits your catalog data can be found on the TechNet Gallery.

Once we've run the five PowerShell scripts, we get the following:

• List content in the Products list. In our scenario, each list item is a product that Contoso is offering and want to display on their website.
• Terms in the Product Hierarchy term set. In our scenario, the term set reflects how Contoso have categorized their products, for example one category is called "Laptops", another one's "MP3" players, etc.
• In the Products list, content in the Item Category column is associated with the correct term from the Product Hierarchy term set. The screenshot below shows how the list item Southridge Video Laptop15.4W M1548  is associated with the term Laptops through the Item Category column.

So, now that we have content in the Products list, the next step is to enable this list as a catalog.

Next blog article in this series
Stage 3: How to enable a list as a catalog

Additional resources

• For more information about creating content for cross-site publishing, see the TechNet article Configure cross-site publishing in SharePoint Server 2013. 
• For more information about cross-site Publishing, see the TechNet scenario page Create SharePoint sites by using cross-site publishing in SharePoint Server 2013.