Heavy-duty Web site management

Complex. Comprehensive. Enormously powerful. Microsoft Corp.'s Site Server 3.0 includes everything Web site administrators need to manage their largest sites but the Web server itself. It wins our World Class award on the strength and breadth of its excellent administration and reporting tools.

The software is organized around three functions: publishing, delivering and analyzing. Publishing involves support for a formal submission, approval and deployment cycle for Web pages. The delivery side offers searching tools, personalization capabilities, push services and knowledge management. The analysis functions include log analysis (including those from other vendors' Web servers), report writing and content analysis.

Configuration and management appear slightly better than in Site Server 2.0, and some operations, such as analysis, are definitely faster in 3.0. Reporting and management features are more polished and comprehensive. And you can now perform most management operations using your choice of the Web interface, the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) or command-line utilities.

Heavy breathing

Perhaps the biggest change in Site Server 3.0 is the Knowledge Management system. At its heart is the search engine, which gathers information into catalogs. Catalogs are topical collections of content from Web pages, file directories, Exchange folders and Open Database Connectivity databases.

Catalogs are administered from the Knowledge Manager via a Web interface or the MMC. You can run the catalog-building process on another server to distribute the load if you wish. Once you've defined a catalog you can schedule it to be automatically updated periodically.

Catalog access to individual pages is controlled by the same security NT applies to the original source data. This is much more important than it may at first sound. It ensures that when users conduct a search, they can't even see matching index entries for content for which they have no access rights.

Push is the next component of Knowledge Manager. Site Server 3.0 includes Active Channel Server to define channels that are delivered in Microsoft's Active Channel Definition Format. Site Server also offers Active Channel Multicaster, which can deliver channels using multicast technology to conserve bandwidth.

Another new feature in Site Server 3.0 is automatic language detection - the ability of the server to determine which language is used without clues or help from anyone in the publishing process. This allows users to search for content in or to restrict their searches to a specific language - a powerful feature for multinational organizations.

The Knowledge Manager interface supports searching of catalogs and a Yahoo-like hierarchical index. The site administrator defines this index to reflect the interests of the organization - what Microsoft calls the Site Vocabulary.

Clicking on a term in the Site Vocabulary runs a search of one or more catalogs using that term. Knowledge Manager can also be used to create briefs, which are sets of saved searches or lists of URLs that can be sent via e-mail or push channels.

You can also create customized interfaces for individual users with the Personalization and Membership services. This subsystem supports an e-mail service you can use to send personalized content linked to individuals' interests. The service also supports member-only content and site personalization, enabling users to tailor site presentation to their tastes.

Finally, Microsoft has improved the site analysis tools in Site Server 3.0. The Report Writer is highly configurable and can report on Microsoft Site Server activity as well as import and analyze logs from other servers.

Content visualization is also supported, with a much improved graphical interface that displays links between documents. Documents are color-coded according to level of usage, and the most heavily used paths through the site are denoted by magenta lines, helping you get a feel for site usage far faster than with any text-based reporting system.

You can also display usage data as animation over time, which gives you valuable insight into site activity, which is impossible to comprehend by just reading textual reports.

Breathe easy

As fine as its reporting tools are, Microsoft doesn't stint when it comes providing tools to publish information. Microsoft divides this processes into five steps: creation, submission, tagging (adding meta tags to describe content for management purposes), approval and deployment. Site Server includes FrontPage and Visual InterDev for the creation step, while the rest of the process is managed through Web forms. Site Server 3.0 doesn't include versioning services, but that feature is planned for a future release.

The publishing process also includes support for production servers and staging servers, which allow content to be deployed in a restricted access environment for testing.

The deployment process has been improved and expanded since Version 2.0. It is now called Site Server 3.0 Content Deployment and supports publishing to Unix servers as well as Microsoft's Internet Information Server. You can manage Content Deployment through the Microsoft Management Console, Site Server's Web interface or through command-line utilities.

Site Server lets you define user roles to control the publishing process:

• Content authors create documents.
• Site editors are in charge of proofing content - for example, ensuring that spelling is correct and that formatting standards are adhered to.
• Site administrators have the ultimate authority in the publishing process. They can create and modify the Web structure and authorize and effect content deployment.

These roles are defined by membership of NT domain groups. Users can have more than one role for different sites and content. You assign users to roles via MMC, User Manager for Domains or the Web-based management interface.

After deployment, Site Server can generate detailed reports of all publishing operations and send them to you automatically via e-mail.

Take a deep breath

All of this power comes with a price, in the form of serious hardware requirements. Microsoft's minimum requirements, as usual, are too low for satisfactory performance. We recommend at least a 266-MHz Pentium Pro or Pentium II processor with 128M bytes of RAM and at least 5G bytes of disk space.

For software, you need Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 or higher and the NT Server 4.0 Option Pack, which itself requires Internet Explorer 4.01.

Give yourself plenty of time for installation - you'll be rebooting the server with monotonous regularity.

You need to read the documentation very carefully to set up all of the components correctly. We recommend using the demonstration configuration the first time around and modifying it to create your final site.

Overall, the installation process is straightforward, if a little tedious. Microsoft could make it easier by figuring out how to get around the need to keep rebooting.

The last breath

Every feature of Site Server 3.0 we examined is well-designed, well-implemented and delivers good performance. While its disk space and memory demands might seem voracious, the scale of Site Server's features more than justifies it.

Site Server 3.0 is a remarkable product. Its scope and feature set is so broad that it will cover a wide range of your information distribution and management needs. But with that breadth comes overhead. Be prepared to invest considerable time and effort in planning, designing and engineering if you expect to get the best out of it.

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Download Site Server eval
From Microsoft.

Price: $1,239 per server (includes 5 client licenses)

Pros: Has everything including the kitchen sink; Covers intranet functionality as well as commerce services; Excellent management and reporting.

Cons: Big footprint, no, make that enormous; Significant learning curve; Requires commitment to get maximum return on investment.

Microsoft seeks e-commerce allies
Industry experts says Site Server 3.0 only marks the first wave of the company's electronic commerce strategy. Network World, 5/25/98.

Gibbs, a member of the Network World Test Alliance, is also a Network World contributing editor, editorial advisor to Intranet Magazine and a marketing and technology consultant. He can be reached at mgibbs@ gibbs.com.