Front Page And The Office Web Components example essay topic

eXPerience FrontpageMicrosoft's. Net Solution Saga Continues... Feb. 25, 2001 - CEBU CITY -You know about the Vermeer story right? Never heard of Vermeer?

Really? So the story goes, as I am usually lounging around with others who have migrated into the vast world of the web, these questions generally come up... Vermeer was the company who silently pioneered Front Page, and was quietly and expeditiously merged into "the empire" at Microsoft. It evolved into two key MS technologies, the Personal Web Server (PWS) and Front Page, now widely utilized at homes worldwide as a key component of Office 2000. Alas the story continues, as I tread the waters deeper and find other so-called web developers around Cebu creating pages and sites for the vastness of the net.

I usually silently snicker inside as they tell me how they learned Front Page at "so and so" institution and have been a professional web developer ever since. Rest assured, I think to myself, they " ll be attending a class or two of mine soon... However, not for nothing, us professional developers (you know these guys, the ones who are making integrated solutions for the guy next down AND several [er, thousand] kilometers away.) usually have little to do with Front Page nowadays. Front Page, long ago the "cream of the crop" silently sits in wait as we tear away with apps such as Ultradev 4, 1st Page, Flash 5, Adobe Photo Shop, XML-Spy, and the Top Style CSS editor. Us "big boys" are playing with such things as. asp, . php, Cold Fusion, Action Script, XSLT, and a myriad of other acronyms that will leave your head spinning. On top of that, we " re all scrambling to learn more Java (for server pages and COM building), Power Builder, and of course, XHTML.

This is not to the fault of Front Page, it still is functional, but has lost it's functionality as we deal with interactive web sites and most (over 85%) of the servers in Cebu can't run Front Page's Server Extensions (That's what JavaScript is for anyway you say... ). But don't fret, they have just breathed life into this ailing creature, redirecting it's path from the tangent path of obsolescence. Enter the next generation of Front Page, a powerhouse of fury packed under the soon-to-be-released Windows OfficeXP umbrella. XP standing for experience, something we " re all going to have to sit down and do ourselves... but for now, here's the primer... What's OfficeXP all about?

Here's the marketing pitch: Whether you are a small business user, a user in a larger organization, an IT administrator, or a user working from home, Office XP is the essential tool to maximize your productivity. Office XP simplifies the way people work within Office, helps users connect to people and information, and offers a higher level of reliability and security. Today, more than ever, working and communicating with teams is critical to success. Whether you are working with one other person on a document, working with a group of coworkers, or working with external partners on a project, Office XP gives you easy solutions that help your team (s) share and collaborate with one another more effectively. Organizations of all shapes and sizes must be assured that the overall investment they make in productivity software is one that offers significant value and return to the organization and its users. With Office XP, this value is realized not only by extensive deployment and management gains, but also by the software's improvements as an enterprise development platform.

Well enough of the pitch, let's get to the main course... First up, as with the current thrust of Microsoft, Front Page is totally. NET (pronounced "dot-net" for those in the know) integrated. Now even if you don't like "the empire" per se, it pays to take a look at what the folks over there at Redmond have been buzzing about. The. NET framework is an "environment for building, deploying, and running web services and other applications.

It consists of three main parts: the Common Language Runtime, the Framework classes, and ASP. NET". It is a single platform in which anyone can develop for, built on COM technology, and offering multiple language support. Go ahead, use anything your familiar with: Visual Basic, Jscript, Managed C++, Perl, Python, Effie l#, Cobol, SmallTalk, even ECMAScript, the building block of JavaScript and WML Script!

While it may not be the best solution for everyone, you can still stick to your ol' Linux & Java platform, but. NET is here to stay... Front Page now makes use of an integrated, increasingly user-friendly interface with new Smart Tags and the Office Task Pane. Smart Tags keep your often-used components up front and add context sensitive help in an on-demand fashion, and seamlessly disappears when your not looking for help. The Task Pane makes it even easier to move around your files with minimal hassle. It takes the less knowledgeable user from the scary task of using features for the first time to Power User in no time.

Microsoft Share Point, new to Office and accessible from Front Page, is a click away. Share Point is a rich, easy-to-create Web site that will improve the way teams manage information and activities. Using only a Web browser, team members can create contact and task lists, event calendars, libraries for storing documents, and surveys. Teams can also have newsgroup discussions and be notified when content on the site changes. Share Point is a Windows-based solution that will work with Windows 2000 Server. Microsoft Share Point Team Web pages can be edited directly in Front Page.

Users can change the theme of the site, add Front Page components, or add static HTML elements to customize their team site exactly the way they want it! A variety of improvements have been made within the Office Web Components, such as support for loading native Excel files, support for named ranges, multiple worksheets, wrapped texts, and the ability to publish entire workbooks with interactivity to the Web. Seamless integration for Front Page. Word offers better handling of generated XML content and rendering of data islands to push into and edit in Front Page. The Excel Pivot Table component offers conditional filtering on a range of expressions for filtering data. Finally, the extended object model for the components allows developers to build custom solutions that deliver data to the browser.

Front Page will now be available in 26 languages (15 were available with Front Page 2000), and includes support for bi-directional character sets and Unicode. This means that users can be in Front Page and create content in whatever language they have installed on their system, and adds growing support internationally for Front Page development Web Distributed Authoring & Versioning (Web-DAV) is a new HTTP-based protocol that people can use to collaborate seamlessly on documents over the Web, regardless of their authoring tools. With Web DAV, users can perform basic remote file operations (for example, copy, move, and delete) across the Web. The support for Web DAV in Exchange 2000 enables Office documents to be stored directly into Exchange Server, facilitating working with and searching. Front Page can be used to edit and manage Web applications hosted on the Web Storage System. For example, Web-based custom forms can be created in Front Page and hosted by the Web Storage System.

Using the native dialog boxes in Front Page, developers can open a Web page directly in the Web Storage System, edit it using the familiar Front Page tools, and then run the application in a browser directly from the Web Storage System. A key design goal was to give developers the tools they need to build powerful, sophisticated database solutions that seamlessly integrate with enterprise-wide data while ensuring forward and backwards compatibility with new and existing database solutions. Access XP now provides the tools to build solutions that integrate and leverage Internet-standards, such as XML, XSL, and dynamic Web pages, to better allow for the sharing and presentation of data across the intranet and Internet. Scalability and authoring is achieved through Front Page and the Office Web Components, which have been greatly enhanced in usability for XML and offer extensibility as the web Component object model has been exposed for script programming of developers. This should see use much the way we can now extend Dreamweaver for our custom team usage requirements. Excel Pivot Tables and OLAP cubes are now easier than ever to push to the web and tweak under Front Page, and Excel spreadsheets can now make use of XML and XSLT's.

Data Binding through Front Page is easier than ever too!