Microsoft FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions Resource Kit

 ^{2 of 6}   Putting the Server Extensions to Work

Installing the FrontPage Server Extensions introduces the power and flexibility of FrontPage into your workplace. Here are two scenarios: In the first, an organization uses the FrontPage Server Extensions on its intranet to share all kinds of information internally. In the second, an Internet service provider finds it easy and profitable to host FrontPage-extended Web sites.

Read these to help you learn how the FrontPage Server Extensions could fit into your business or organization:

• Put your HR department on an intranet
  
• Internet service provider adopts FrontPage

Put your HR department on an intranet

Your company has been growing. A year ago, your IT department installed a Web server and began posting some company information — schedules, work specifications, and limited personnel information — for departments that wanted to share their information for browsing over the company's intranet.

But as your company grows and everyone catches on to the benefits of sharing information over the intranet, it becomes clear to your IT department that a single Web site can't meet all the needs of your team. The Human Resources department wants to put payroll information online, using the company's database as a back end. At the same time, other departments, like Finance and Engineering, are making similar requests.

Each department has complex needs. For example, the HR department wants room to grow an entire HR Web site, with an employee handbook, personal data, job listings, and other content. The HR managers also want control over who can author different parts of their Web content. For example, only members of the Career Center should be able to create and edit job listings. The managers even want to limit who can browse certain areas of the Web site. For instance, only managers should be able to browse personal data.

FrontPage is the solution for your intranet problem, with the FrontPage Server Extensions on the back end and the FrontPage client and Microsoft Office on the front end. Because FrontPage can divide Web content on a single server into multiple content areas called subwebs, each with its own set of authors and users, your fast-growing intranet can be brought back under control.

Because your team can use familiar Office 2000 applications — such as Word, Excel, and Microsoft® PowerPoint® — along with Microsoft FrontPage to create content, everyone is quickly up and running on your FrontPage-enabled intranet. Furthermore, thanks to the tight integration of Office 2000 with the FrontPage Server Extensions, authors are able to create Word, Excel, and other Office documents and save them directly to the Web server, similar to how they save documents to other computers on the intranet. Publishing new information on the intranet is fast and easy.

After installing the FrontPage Server Extensions (an easy process), your intranet is divided into FrontPage-extended subwebs. The root web area remains under the control of the IT department, who can administer the entire Web site. You give one subweb to each department:

• http://yourcompany/Finance
• http://yourcompany /Engineering
• http://yourcompany/HR

To achieve finer control, you give your HR department a set of subwebs below its primary subweb:

• http://yourcompany/HR/Jobs
• http://yourcompany/HR/Benefits
• http://yourcompany/HR/Employees

The employee handbook is stored in http://yourcompany/HR. Because all HR department members have authoring permission on this subweb, any HR team member can edit this handbook. Job listings are in http://yourcompany/HR/Jobs. Only members of the Career Center can author job listings, but any employee can browse through these listings. Here is a table summarizing the different user permissions that are set up for each subweb:

Thanks to the power and ease of use of Microsoft Office 2000 and FrontPage, everyone is soon taking advantage of the FrontPage-enabled intranet. Content is easy to create and update. And authors find it easy to adjust to the new intranet because they are able to continue working with the powerful, easy-to-use tools they've been using all along.

Internet service provider adopts FrontPage

Your company is an Internet service provider with growing pains. It offers Web site hosting on a network of Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) servers, Netscape servers, and Apache servers.

As more and more customers signed on for your services, your company was getting bogged down in complicated server-maintenance processes. Some clients wanted multiple authors to have varying levels of access to individual content areas. Properly configuring each Web content area's security by hand had become a time-consuming and error-prone process.

It had also gotten cumbersome to update each customer's content area. Customers have needed complicated instructions on how to FTP their pages, images, and other content to the server. Along with their new content, customers have been redundantly posting content that hasn't changed, slowing down your servers. Tracking customers' e-mail requests and FTP postings was convoluted, not secure, and error-prone, and the support lines have been constantly ringing.

As you've been experiencing these growing pains, you've heard about more and more ISPs who use the FrontPage Server Extensions to host FrontPage-extended Web sites. These ISPs have gained customers by offering prepackaged, advanced features that normally require programming and manual configuration, such as discussion groups, form results handling (including e-mail form handlers), full-text indexing, and hit counters — all supplied by the FrontPage Server Extensions.

You also learn that the FrontPage Server Extensions provide built-in security features, such as the ability to assign varying levels of permissions to administrators, authors, and Web site visitors, along with the ability to prevent the execution of programs and scripts in a Web site. These features, all accessible from the FrontPage client, give customers control of security features that normally require intervention by your technical staff. Another obvious benefit of hosting FrontPage-extended webs is that it gives customers the ability to divide their content areas into nested subwebs, each of which can have its own authors, URLs, and sets of permissions.

Perhaps the most convenient feature of all to your technical staff is the ability of customers with FrontPage to author directly from your servers and to publish to them directly. Using the Publish Web command in the FrontPage client, each customer's Web site can be incrementally updated with new and changed content, without requiring the full Web site to be downloaded and without using the less-secure FTP protocol.

Security was a top concern at your company, so you did some research on the FrontPage Server Extensions. You read the thorough discussion of security in the Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions Resource Kit. You learned that, when properly installed and configured, the FrontPage Server Extensions are safe and secure. You also learned that over 600 Internet service providers worldwide, including many industry leaders, have already adopted the FrontPage Server Extensions for their Web hosting services.

So now your company has added the FrontPage Server Extensions, and soon you as well as your growing list of customers are enjoying the benefits of this decision. Getting set up was easy for your technical staff. The server extensions included well-designed and well-documented installation programs. Using the administration tools in FrontPage, it has even been possible to sign up new customers through the Web and install the FrontPage Server Extensions on each account automatically. And your customers are benefiting from the powerful FrontPage client feature set supported by the server extensions on your Web servers.

Next, you'll apply to join the Microsoft FrontPage Web Presence Provider program. As you learned from the Web Presence Provider information , registered web presence providers get a referral link on the Microsoft Web site, timely information on FrontPage WPP programs, product beta programs, server extensions upgrades, no-charge technical support, and other benefits.