Dear Charles,
In order to use the SharePoint features that are available in Microsoft
FrontPage, you have to ask your hosting company to install SharePoint
services on their production server. Microsoft SharePoint services is
available as a free download at the following URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/sharepoint/wss.mspx
One day, in a time not so long ago, as the Solutions Architect for an
ISP/Hosting firm focusing on small business clients, I read the
following words at a Microsoft site:
"Windows SharePoint Services is the Windows Server 2003 component that
helps organizations increase individual and team productivity by
enabling them to create Web sites for information sharing and document
collaboration."
"Sites based on Windows SharePoint Services, called SharePoint sites,
take file storage to a new level and help create communities for team
collaboration. Users can collaborate on documents, tasks, and events
and easily share contacts and other information. In addition, Windows
SharePoint Services makes it easy for managers of teams and sites to
manage site content and user activity. The environment is designed for
flexible deployment, administration, and application development."
"By integrating Web-based team collaboration services into everyday
tools such as Microsoft Office, users can quickly and effectively adopt
new collaboration tools and services. And by providing Web-browser
access, Windows SharePoint Services makes it easy for users to access
team information through a single site on demand."
I was so happy and excited that I called an emergency meeting of the
company heads to discuss offering SharePoint services to our clients on
a production server. At that meeting, we discussed all of the benefits
of SharePoint based sites; besides all of the obvious advantages
(collaboration, document handling, etc.), clients could even control
the look and content of their own site, thereby reducing the load on
the site administrator/webmaster. Since all of our clients relied on
their Office applications to conduct their business, I couldn't stop
smiling - I had surely hit the ball out of the park with this idea.
We installed SharePoint services on the production server, a standard
Windows 2003 server installation, that evening. In the room was the
server administrator, the company president, and I. After backing up
all settings and web sites (with a production server, you don't trust
anybody, not even Microsoft). Well, the installation went without a
hitch; quickly, and without warnings. The whole process took about five
minutes. Immediately after installing the software, we opened up the
IIS console to explore our new product.
Everything about the way IIS and website administration was conducted
had changed. Now it was like the page you get when you click Tools ->
Server -> Administration Home... in FrontPage - the page that you get
at the url: /_vti_bin/_vti_adm/fpadmdll.dll of your website. The
server administrator hated it, he didn't know how to run anything
anymore, and so we decided to uninstall it. Guess what we found out?
You can't uninstall it, really. Even if you remove it, the new method
of administering the server had changed forever. We quickly went on the
web to find out if we had missed something in the installation process,
and then got Microsoft technical support on the phone. We were told
that the administration change was indeed permanent, but there was no
problem, because Microsoft was moving its server site administration
schema in that direction anyway. We spent the rest of the night wiping
the hard drives clean, and restoring the server from the backup we had
done just before the installation. The next day I was looking for new
job.
The point of my story? Not many Sysops use (and, therefore, not many
hosting companies offer) SharePoint services because of the way it
changes the way the server's sites are administered and tasks
performed, and few want to learn a whole new way of doing their job.
Because it is not truly uninstallable, and no company wants to harm
their production servers, it is a more than a little difficult to find
hosting companies that offer SharePoint services.
If your hosting company can't (or won't) install SharePoint services
for you, you will not be able to use SharePoint features on your
website. You might have to change your hosting provider - there is a
pretty good list of firms that offer SharePoint services support at the
following URL:
http://james.wss.bcentral.com/sharepoint/vendordirectory.aspx
As an alternative, if you have considerable (I mean monumental) skills
writing web applications, lots of money, and have a few spare months on
your hands, you can develop a web site that does everything that
SharePoint services does, and do it all your own. Whatever you decide
to do, Charles, I wish you good luck.
Nicholas Savalas -
http://savalas.tv