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By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 4/21/97

What do you do about publishing on your intranet if you have a huge number of documents, huge documents, or even worse, huge numbers of huge documents? And what if you have to be able to control use and charge for access?

You'd likely turn to a handful of companies known for handling documents on PCs. One of the most successful of those companies is Folio Corp., which is now bringing its expertise to bear on intranets with siteDirector, a Webified document publishing system.

Operating as a Web server back-end application (otherwise called a script), siteDirector provides, controls and meters browser access to document databases residing on Web servers. These document databases, called infobases, have em-bedded indexing.

Infobases, which are at the heart of Folio's regular and Webified publishing systems, can include text and hyperlinks to internal documents and external URLs, image files, OLE objects, video and audio files and binary applications. This allows for the creation of complex and content-rich document databases.

Many vendors of proprietary data, such as legal reference works, use infobase technology as a delivery mechanism because of its rich feature set. In addition, infobases appeal to informational product vendors because user access can be controlled at multiple levels of permission and usage can be metered. This provides, for example, a practical method for selling a single CD-ROM and limiting access to specific documents and optionally charging for actual access.

The Webified Folio system is valuable for creating enormous, multimedia-rich searchable document databases that can be retrieved by any browser-enabled user. For example, a large law office might post a legal publication created using infobase technology on the intranet. With siteDirector, any attorney who has a browser could access the data, no matter what operating system is running on the client.

This contrasts with the traditional Folio publishing system, for which each attorney would need a copy of the Folio Views client software.

The latest version of siteDirector, 3.1, runs reliably and offers excellent performance in access and searching. However, it was a complete pain to get site-Director running, which, in my case, involved installing it on an existing Web server.

What's up, Doc?

In the paper and on-disk documentation, Folio claims it supports Microsoft Corp.'s Inter-net Information Server (IIS) and Netscape Communications Corp.'s Enterprise Server.

But the installation program didn't know I was running IIS, so I had to configure the Web server manually.

When I tried to bring siteDirector onto my existing IIS setup, I wound up with problems accessing some of the siteDirector Web pages because the URLs were not resolved correctly. I could dedicate the Web server to siteDirector, but in the process, I would lose access to my existing Web content.

Now, it's conceivable that if you have a significant document collection, the default configuration is just fine because serving infobases would probably be all you'd want the server to do. Nonetheless, it shouldn't be that hard to configure siteDirector for another Web server. (I eventually did figure out how to do it.)

Infobasics

You can do a lot with infobases without much knowledge of Folio's document tag language (used for many of the same purposes as HTML, along with many infobase-specific features) and document construction automation system. But for serious document collections with sophisticated content, you'll need to have someone fully trained in building infobases.

Once you've constructed your infobases, you simply need to tell siteDirector where to find them and which templates, called SoftPages, to use in their display. You do this through the site-Director configuration manager utility.

You can create or edit SoftPage files with any editing tool, but your task will be simpler if you use Folio's HomeSite utility. However, HomeSite is not nearly as graphical or functional as editors such as Microsoft's FrontPage.

By creating or editing SoftPage files, you can have siteDirector present information in any way you please, including the use of JavaScript, Java applets or ActiveX components on pages retrieved by siteDirector.

Infobases can be created from any data source.

An interesting option is to create content using Folio's Web Retriever, a utility that accepts URLs and copies URL contents, such as graphics, into infobases. In an intranet, for example, Web Retriever would let you take snapshots of useful internal and external sites, and allow you to search at a speed and detail level that the target sites might not support. Better still, where there's a link to a page that hasn't been downloaded into the infobase, the link will point to the original URL so Web browsers can seamlessly transfer to that page.

siteDirector plays an interesting role in environments that require content-usage tracking and billing. Folio offers its Meter API for activities such as session and event management. You need to create an application in C/C++ or another language that can call the API.

siteDirector is an impressive tool: Its flexibility is remarkable and its performance, even with huge, complex infobases, is excellent.

And Folio assures me it is working on the Web server integration problem.