Verdict:
A difficult package to understand, but with plenty of extra features to make Web pages easier to use over an intranet.
Currently, the best use of an intranet - a local area network running TCP/IP, allowing you to access the internal and external networked worlds - is sharing textual information, and HoTMetaL Intranet Publisher (HiP) is intended to give you the tools you need for that purpose.
HiP consists of four main programs. The HiP Monitor needs to be installed on the corporate Web server, which can be a Windows NT or Unix box. Apart from that, you won't need anything special on your Web server to take advantage of the extended features. The client end requires two HiP plug-ins taking up about 460Kb, and a Javascript enabled browser, such as Netscape 2 and above or Internet Explorer 3, but to make use of the cascading sheet editor, you'll have to confine your users to Internet Explorer 3. The other two segments of the pie are a special edition of HoTMetaL 3 (reviewed issue 25, p213) renamed the HiP Editor and a site management tool.
Unlike the Internet, on an intranet you can make assumptions about who will see your pages and what software they're using. HiP capitalises on this by making full use of proprietary extensions to standard HTML.
Thanks to a utility accessible from the HiP Information Manager site management tool or the HiP Editor, you can design a new tag with the same function as the standard tag of your choice, but with a different name. Using the other HiP utilities, these User Definable Extensions (UDEs) let you define styles and tables of contents which will pick up only those HTML elements you want them to. For example, you might want links to internal pages to be in a certain font and to appear in the index. HiP also has a handy new tag for creating text which pops out in its own box from a Web page.
Pages you create or convert in the HiP Editor also have code hidden in the
element at the start of the HTML. A Javascript loads the dynamic table of contents. elements store dynamic information about when and by whom the page was created and last modified, and also store the names of the topics of which the page is a part.
Topics are keywords or phrases
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which group pages. elements define the files to load for the UDE scheme and the table of contents. An extra frame is loaded with the page, which parses certain variables from the result of the scripts. This contains the table of contents for the page and sports a toolbar. You can annotate each member of the list, re-order the list, search the list and subscribe to HiP Monitor updates about the page. When you create a page with the HiP Editor, you tell the browser which elements will be indexed:
,
and so on, or the UDEs you've created. By creating or assigning a scheme to the page, the index is created dynamically from these elements when the page is loaded.
The HiP Monitor serves the site administrator a series of Web pages on the fly, letting them view information about server events, operating system events like full disks, and details about the status of the Web site. You can configure which options are turned on by filling in a form on another Web page. But when a client subscribes via the table of contents in the viewer, they tell the HiP Monitor to send an email message when the page subscribed to has changed. Alternatively, you can subscribe to topics and authors. You're sent an email when a topic you've subscribed to has some new or changed pages, or the author has created a new page.
HiP is hard to understand at first. Taken as a site design package it's powerful. The HiP Editor is a capable design tool, and the HiP Information Manager is about the best site visualisation tree currently available. All your links are mapped into a web you can drag around to view more of. You can map broken and external links, and log all orphaned files, allowing you to clean up your site so all the links work and there's nothing unnecessary.
You can also access the HiP-specific utilities such as the UDE and Table of Contents and Cascading Style Sheet Editors, and convert sites created with other packages. I had trouble getting the Information Manager to upload my site to an external Web space, although on an intranet you can upload to any server visible on the network with a simple file copy.
With the extensions, HiP can give you a living web which can keep your workgroup up to date with calendars and schedules, internal contact information like phone extension lists, and corporate news. What the clients see is just as easy to use as any Web page, and they won't need much training to get the most out of it. The design end, however, requires a difficult conceptual leap and has a steep learning curve. Before you even think about using HiP, make sure you have a need for an intranet and that you're ready to make the effort to maintain it.
By James Morris
SPECIFICATIONS:
Windows 95 or above, 32Mb of RAM, 25Mb of disk space. Server side needs Windows NT Server 3.51 or later, Sun Solaris Sparc 2.5 or later, or
