WebDeveloper.com Software Review / Microsoft FrontPage 2000

FrontPage 2000:
Why 2K?
(Part 4)

By David Fiedler

All for One, and One for All

FrontPage 2000 is moving up towards the big leagues, not just in performance and capabilities, but also in terms of audience. Microsoft expects that Web developers (not just reviewers) will find it good enough to work with professionally.

With that in mind, there are over a dozen "instant" content and site management reports integrated into the main views. While they're no threat to serious tools like Linkbot, they're very convenient to use and are very handy for finding (and quickly fixing) broken internal links and the like.

Share and Share Alike

Perhaps more important from the strategic point of view are the new collaboration/workgroup features. You can easily set up workflow procedures, including assigning tasks or documents to specific people or groups. You can set up files to be checked in or out, so two people don't inadvertently work on the same document and "collide". And you can also set up "subwebs" with different permissions, so that a group could be responsible for their own section of a Web site, without giving that group the ability to overwrite the site as a whole. These functions are basically similar to high-end products such as QuarkExpress Publisher.

Naturally, Microsoft hopes you will buy not only FrontPage but also the rest of its Office 2000 brethren and sistren. They make this a very seductive offer by total integration. If you're into databases, wait till you see how easy it is to integrate and create Access databases on the fly!

In terms of actual content creation, any of the Office 2000 applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) can "save as Web page" and produce an amazingly good result (see a sample Word document here (you might have to right-click to save it to your computer) and the Web page it created here).

Such a page can be opened as is by a Web browser, but it retains enough of its original structure that -- when you click on it for editing purposes -- it's opened by the original application automatically.

I had some intermittent problems testing copy-and-paste, but ran the new "detect problems and repair" function and they went away. What I found was that drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste is extremely impressive and bulletproof. I copy/pasted this message from an HTML newsletter received in Eudora, and the results (and HTML source) speak for themselves.

The Thrilling Conclusion

It's going to be getting a lot harder for people to gratuitously bash Microsoft when FrontPage 2000 is released next week! It may not be the HTML editor of choice for diehard tag freaks, but it might just be your next all-purpose authoring tool.

Whether you're a serious Web developer who needs collaborative capabilities, or just one of those folks who always wanted to create Web sites -- but wanted to wait for an easy-to-use tool that wouldn't limit you in the future -- FrontPage 2000 is probably the best $150 you can spend anywhere.

It's easily good enough to win one of our coveted WebDeveloper Product Awards, which is something I never expected after testing the very first FrontPage way back in 1995!