Product Reviews

Alongside the lesser-known NetObjects Fusion MX (see opposite), Microsoft FrontPage caters for those users wanting to produce a Web site without having to master the intricacies of HTML. With Microsoft's general software dominance it's hardly a fair fight as things stand, but with the company's new and total commitment to the Web, FrontPage 2002 should have an unbeatable edge. So what does the latest version have to offer?

In terms of FrontPage's interface and working environment, relatively little has changed apart from the addition of page tabs under the main toolbar. Other than this, the main advances all come from closer integration with the rest of the Microsoft Office suite. This includes shared features such as the new options for controlling formatting when pasting and the New, Search and Clipboard task panes. Particularly useful for producing attractive page designs should be the new support for AutoShape drawing, clip-art management and WordArt text effects - though I was unable to get these up and running on my system.

In terms of new power, as with the latest Fusion, much of this comes in the form of new services available from the main Insert Web Component command. The new Photo Gallery service is a good case in point with its ability to automatically turn sets of photos into thumbnail-based Web galleries. More regularly useful is the new Link Bar component that builds on FrontPage's existing use of automatic links and rollovers to offer arbitrary links to any page and to other sites. This ability to easily and interactively manage site navigation is one of the features that helps FrontPage users get off to a flying start - but Fusion's Site view and master borders are even simpler.

Another set of new FrontPage components provides a range of server-side services. The program has long offered a crude on-screen counter but now you can add components to provide serious usage analysis with daily, weekly or monthly Web statistics reports. You can also add an automatically updated top ten list to your site, including links to the most popular pages.

Other component options include the ability to link directly to Microsoft's bCentral for banner ads, affiliate links and even to build up a catalogue of items to sell online. You can also add automatically updated Web content to your pages, although in each case the news, weather forecasts, shopping advice, maps and stock quotes are all being supplied from MSN and Expedia, so you have to ask yourself who's doing who

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Another reason to be wary is that, unlike Fusion MX, some of the FrontPage 2002 components require your server to be running special FrontPage Extensions. This has long been a criticism as users either find much of FrontPage's functionality unavailable or have to pay extra to get their ISP to provide support or, even more serious, find themselves tied in to a proprietary solution. Microsoft is clearly impervious to the criticism - it has developed the idea further with its new SharePoint Team Services server-side system.

As its name suggests, SharePoint is all about teamworking. Once your SharePoint site has been set up it's simple to store and share information by setting up document libraries and templates; end users can then edit content, upload documents and take part in online discussions directly from the browser. SharePoint sites can be opened directly in FrontPage and themes, graphics, link bars and up-to-date lists of events, announcements, links and so on can be customised. It's too early to tell how successful and scalable SharePoint will prove in practice, but the potential benefits for an easy-to-set-up and manage intranet are clear.

FrontPage's use of add-on components is very impressive, but what about the program's fundamental Web page power? Incredibly, almost nothing has been added to FrontPage's core layout capabilities. The advances in table-based layout editing, for example, amount to little more than a drop-down Border tool to manage the appearance of cell borders and the ability to quickly copy content from one table cell to another - hardly pushing back the boundaries.

That wouldn't matter so much if FrontPage offered a Fusion-style wysiwyg layout system that allowed you to quickly design your page on-screen and then took care of creating the necessary HTML behind the scenes, but it doesn't. At least FrontPage does let you edit the page's underlying code directly with its HTML Source view - but while the likes of Dreamweaver and GoLive continually strive to outdo each other with new coding functionality, FrontPage's has been left to stagnate.

This is bizarre. With neither serious behind-the-scenes nor direct coding capabilities, FrontPage seems unconcerned about the bread-and-butter work of Web page layout. It's as if it's not just the FrontPage user who's trying to avoid getting their hands dirty with HTML, it's Microsoft too.

And fundamentally that's the point. Yes Microsoft is entirely committed to the Web, but its vision isn't built on HTML but on its own .NET brand of XML. When all the Microsoft application file formats go XML-native, what's the point of an HTML-based authoring package? No wonder Microsoft is more interested in developing the FrontPage add-ons than the core HTML engine.

Ultimately FrontPage might still find a central position acting as the gateway to the Microsoft-based office intranet. In the meantime, today's Web is still very much built on HTML, and for those users wanting to produce professional sites without having to learn to program, the solution is clear - Fusion MX.