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The hole in the bottom of the FrontPage boxMicrosoft's hot Web product isn't all it's cracked up to beTo read Microsoft's ads in the front of the computer magazines, it has "everything any Webmaster needs"'. The reviewers seem to agree. Naming Microsoft FrontPage among the best products of 1996, PC Magazine enthusiastically declared it offered a complete web authoring solution "with a minimum of stress and strain". "Everything you need to design a Web page", announced a rapt PC Computing. "You supply the content, FrontPage handles the rest." No wonder potential Web site owners are clamouring for the newest member of Microsoft's Office family. At Access One, among Australia's largest Internet Service Providers, systems administrator James Burton estimates up to half the firm's corporate clients voice interest in FrontPage - a tribute to Microsoft's heavy marketing. Last time I visited one Melbourne software shop, I found FrontPage displayed in pride of place, right betweeen the front door and the counter. At this rate, the program could become the Microsoft Word of the Website creation software market. There's just one problem. Hardly any of Australia's Internet Service Providers are willing to cater to the program's more sophisticated features. Many won't touch them with a pole. For Microsoft, that's more than just a serious problem. It's a hole in the bottom of the box, through which much of the program's advantage escapes. FrontPage's greatest strength is its ability to let users create the sort of sophisticated Web sites which would normally require a complex process called CGI scripting. Frontpage "Web bots" help create pages where visitors can perform a full-text search, fill in a form or take part in an on-line discussion. But these "Web bots" will only work with your ISP's co-operation. The ISP must install on his server a free program known as the FrontPage server extensions. Without these server extensions, the fancy features won't work - and for Australians, FrontPage becomes just another competent Web authoring program, fighting it out with offerings from Claris, Corel Netscape and others. ISPs mark Microsoft downMany potential FrontPage users appear to be wondering why no ISP will help them out. Lighthouse combed FrontPage newsgroups and asked more than 40 Australian ISPs about the program - and found the answers. Indeed, when The Age e-mailed Australian ISPs, description of the server extensions' problems flooded in. Not one ISP supported them. Grahame Jordan, system administrator at Australia On Line, calls the server extensions "an administrator's nightmare". Access One's James Burton rates them at "less than one out of ten". Several ISP representatives say that in the long run, FrontPage's server problems make the $149 program an unusually expensive solution. Why the hostility? For a start, many server administrators find the server extensions hard to install and run. "You read the documentation, and that's about where the gates of hell are," says Access One's Burton. "You run the installer (program), and it installs this enormous mess". When they are running, Burton says, "the load they place on the server is quite extreme". GigaNet webmaster Alex Robinson installed them and then took them off because they weren't worth the trouble. Com-Cen's Liam Bal did the same. Fear of HackingBut overwhelmingly, the reluctance to install the Microsoft extensions springs from security fears - specifically, fears that the extensions will let a determined hacker infiltrate a server and change other FrontPage users' Web pages. The concerns began spreading last year, helped along by the concerns of people like Scott Lystig Fritchie, the network engineer at Minnesota's MRNet Internet Services who posted his concernes on a server security newsgroup and his Web site, along with a simple script which allowed anyone to hack open a FrontPage server. Many Australian ISPs take FrontPage's vulnerability very seriously. Says PixelTech's John Krivitsky: "If the ISP hosts multiple virtual domains - and all ISPs do - any user who is using FrontPage extensions is capable of modifying the pages of any other other user who is also using these extensions." Krivitsky says the security risks were so obvious in the original Microsoft documentation that PixelTech decided against installing them. Other local ISPs agree. Australian NetLink's Peter Vaskess says his firm "would not take that kind of risk". "Their security was completely wacky," says Access One's Burton, ruefully. According to a Netspace spokesman, "a number of security concerns caused us not to want to install it". Agrees Starway's Ron O'Hara, "from what information is available, the security concerns are quite real". Adds O'Hara, acidly: "That won't stop Microsoft from selling lots of copies to an unsuspecting marketplace". Microsoft stays mumPerhaps understandably, Microsoft appears reluctant to say too much about ISPs' acceptance of its new star program. The 235-page FrontPage 97 manual notes that some ISPs may not yet have them, but gives no hint that many ISPs will flatly refuse to install them. Microsoft's Web site doesn't list Australian ISPs who have the server extensions installed. To date Lighthouse has discovered four. One is running an experimental site and preferred not to be named for system security reasons. The other three are Access One, Australia Online and the Melbourne-based HiLink Internet. Access One provides FrontPage to corporate-rate clients on demand. Australia Online charges FrontPage users an extra $500 a year to cover FrontPage's extra administration needs. All four have had to spend time reworking the server extensions, and none is enthusiastically promoting FrontPage's availability, despite what HiLink's Daniel O'Callaghan calls "significant demand"."A lot of people ask about it but decide not to use it when they are told about the security issues", explains another system administrator. So what do you do?You could, of course, use a US firm to host your site; Microsoft's site lists a number of US hosting sites. But you may want the convenience of being able to phone your ISP during normal working hours - and judging by the Australian experience, many US ISPs may seek a premium for FrontPage hosting. You could also seek to use FrontPage 97 as a standard web site creation service and ignore the "Web bots" which require the extensions. As an $A149 editing package, FrontPage 97 still offers good value, with sophisticated features for creating Web pages and sites and a bundled Image Composer program for maniulating graphics. But while you can decide to avoid the extensions, Microsoft makes it harder to carry out this pledge. The FrontPage program doesn't give any hint of when you'll need the extensions and when you won't. Neither does the manual. Ironically Microsoft - famously fond of attempting to create proprietary standards - didn't create the server extensions' problems. Rather, it inherited them when Bill Gates opened his chequebook and paid the small US firm Vermeer more than $A150 million for its smart-looking Web authoring program. Now Microsoft must live with Vermeer's legacy. Most Internet Service Providers, it seems, will not; they're guiding their clients towards other tools. That may leave Microsoft's hot product with a luke-warm future in Australia.
Unpackaging FrontPage
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Lighthouse's review