Managing Sites on Your Intranet with FrontPage

Tools That Simplify Web Site Administration

After a Web site is published, you need to control who can view the site, who can edit the content, and who can administer the site. And, while a Web site is under construction, you need to prevent two or more authors from changing a file at the same time. Microsoft FrontPage provides several effective, and easy-to-use tools to help you administer Web sites.

Managing permissions

To help you manage access to webs on a Web server, FrontPage provides simple role-based administrative tools for setting permissions. For each FrontPage-extended web on a Web server, you can set permissions for users in the following three roles:

• Web site visitors

  These users have browsing permission to view and use a FrontPage-extended web after it has been published on a Web server.

• Authors

  These users have authoring permission, which is permission to open a FrontPage-extended web and modify its content.

• Administrators
• These users have administering permission, which is permission to add, upgrade, or remove Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions from a FrontPage-extended web; create and delete subwebs; log authoring operations; set permissions for other users; and perform other administrative tasks.

FrontPage-extended web permissions are hierarchical, which means that a user with administrative permissions has authoring and browsing permissions. A user with authoring permissions has browsing permissions.

By default, the permissions you set for a web are inherited by all the subwebs below it. However, you can set unique permissions for a subweb that override the permissions it inherits from the parent web. You set permissions for a web in FrontPage by using FrontPage Server Extensions utilities, such as the command-line utility Fpsrvadm or the Permissions command on the Tools menu.

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Determining the level of source control you need

The complexity of a Web project, and the number of people working on it, determine how much source control you need to manage the project effectively. When you use FrontPage, you can work with three levels of source control.

• Level 1 source control is built into FrontPage. If two users open and edit the same file at the same time, the user who saves the file first can do so as usual. However, if the other user tries to save the file, FrontPage displays a warning that the file has been modified. If the second user ignores the warning and saves the file, the changes that the first user made are overwritten. If the second user heeds the warning and does not save the file, the changes that the second user made are lost.
• Level 2 source control supports checking in and checking out the files on a Web site. When one person has a file checked out, no other person can check out or save changes to the same file.
• Level 3 source control requires you to use Microsoft Visual SourceSafe® or any other configuration management application that provides both source control and version control. Visual SourceSafe is not included in Office 2000, but it provides you with the best source control. By using Visual SourceSafe, you can check in and check out files, recover previous versions of files, and much more.

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Supporting sophisticated functionality

If the FrontPage Server Extensions are installed on a Web Server, Web authors can easily include sophisticated functionality in their Web sites. FrontPage Server Extensions support hit counters, full-text searches, e-mail form-handling, and other functions that an author can add to a Web site. You don’t have to download, buy, or install a separate CGI-compatible program to enable each function to work. FrontPage Server Extensions work on Microsoft Windows NT and UNIX operating systems, and many popular Web servers such as Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Apache, WebSite, and Netscape.

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See also

Each Office application offers unique tools for publishing documents to an intranet or the Web. For more information, see Using Office Documents in a Web World.