To: esecurities(tm) who wrote (2143 ) 7/30/1998 9:59:00 PM From: esecurities(tm) Respond to of 4231
An early look at HoTMetaL competitor FrontPage 2000:Web Authoring Gets DemocraticMicrosoft's upcoming version of their FrontPage Web authoring tool encourages department-level Webmasters "...Microsoft is showing an early prerelease version of its FrontPage 2000 Web authoring tool, scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 1999, which sheds light on Microsoft's overall Web authoring strategy and how that strategy may impact both Webmasters and users of the upcoming Office 2000 productivity suite. The new version of FrontPage features tight integration with Office 2000. The integration is intended to cater to organizations in which, increasingly, content creators at the department level are putting content onto Web sites themselves rather than handing it off to a Webmaster. According to Andrew Schulert, general manager in charge of FrontPage development at Microsoft, a sea change is taking place in how Web sites are managed. Until now, says Schulert, content contributors have typically handed off their content to a Web site manager who's responsible for formatting the content in HTML and posting it to a site. The new trend, though, is that content contributors bypass Webmasters in many instances and post HTML content to a Web site themselves. Especially in businesses, department-level content contributors are working directly with their Web sites...FrontPage 2000 will integrate Office HTML editing so that FrontPage can add, edit, and manage Office documents on and off the Web. Interoperability with Office 2000 is the primary design goal in FrontPage 2000...Among other new features in FrontPage 2000, the authoring tool can send and receive HTML documents to and from Office applications using XML (Extensible Markup Language), and the new FrontPage will build reports showing when documents were posted to a Web site or when they are scheduled to be posted. FrontPage 2000 will also support permissions for logging pages in and out of the site-posting queue, 12 languages, and Visual Basic for Applications..." © [July 29] 1998 PC MAGAZINE zdnet.com