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Sent: 2004/01/08
Audience: All hosting customers
As you may already be aware, Microsoft Frontpage is a very popular website development tool for webmasters of all levels. Its WYSIWYG interface makes it easy for a webmaster to quickly and easily create web pages, and with its versioning capabilities, FrontPage enables the user to easily upload only those files that have been modified. Previously, we only supported FrontPage on our Windows Hosting package, but that has now changed with the introduction of our latest product feature release--FrontPage Server Extensions for Unix Hosting Accounts.
While there are FrontPage Extensions for Unix systems in general, supporting them in the Unix environment involved opening up security vulnerabilities that would leave otherwise secure Unix systems open to malicious attack. System security is one of the fundamentals of ensuring top level service and is a facet of service we take very seriously; however, we also recognize client demand.
Many Webmasters and Developers prefer to host their websites on the more stable and developmentally diverse Unix environment, but would also like to take advantage of the ease FrontPage offers as a website development tool. Our team of programmers have developed a modified version of the FrontPage Server Extensions that not only supports FrontPage 98 through 2002 on our Linux and Sun Solaris servers, but also preserves the system security and stability that users expect of those server environments.
You can easily install FrontPage Server Extensions on your Unix Hosting account through the netConsole. Simply go to the Package Installer section and select FrontPage Server Extensions in the dropdown box, then click on "Install" button to the right. Once this is complete, you may use FrontPage to publish content to your website.
There are a few things you must keep in mind when using FrontPage with your Unix Hosting account.
Additional FrontPage authors can safely be created under the Authors tab of the netConsole. The Authors tab normally creates additional FTP user accounts under your website, but once the FrontPage Server Extensions are installed, creating a new author in the netConsole also sets their home directory up as a new subweb.
Unfortunately, creating new FrontPage Authors on Windows Hosting accounts still cannot be safely supported in a virtual hosting environment, so it is still yet unavailable for sites hosted on our Windows servers.
As with Windows FrontPage webs, it is highly recommended that if you use FrontPage to edit or upload files to your site, that you do not make modifications via FTP. Modifications made through FTP may not be picked up by FrontPage's versioning scheme, which may cause problems the next time you try to publish using FrontPage.
FrontPage ASP and database functions are not applicable in the Unix environment and are only supported on Windows FrontPage webs.
With this new feature release, Webmasters and Developers hosted on Linux and Solaris servers may now use FrontPage in developing their websites. Equally significant, current accounts hosted on our Windows 2000 servers (who do not use FrontPage ASP and database functions) may now consider switching their accounts to Linux or Solaris in favor of the multi-authoring support, as well as the more stable and secure Unix hosting environment.