Using Office with a Web Server

Using Office with Other Web Servers

When you connect to Web servers running Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) or Personal Web Server, you can use all of the Microsoft Office 2000 Web features. However, when you connect to a Web server that is not running IIS or Personal Web Server, you can still use a subset of the Office 2000 Web features.

Collaborating on documents stored on remote servers

Although OSE cannot be installed on a computer running Web server software other than IIS or Personal Web Server, users can still use Microsoft Office Server Extensions (OSE) collaboration features with that server if a single Microsoft Web server that has OSE installed is available on the network.

Web Discussions

You can configure the Web Discussions feature to allow users to discuss documents that are stored on a server that does not have OSE installed. In this scenario, you can use any Web server software on the Web server storing the remote documents. The discussion data is stored locally on the Web server with the OSE-extended web or in a remote Microsoft SQL Server database.

Web Subscriptions

The Web Subscriptions feature is partially supported for documents stored on a remote server. However, for remote documents, users can subscribe to e-mail notifications regarding only new or changed discussion items. Subscriptions cannot be created for changes in the content of remote documents.

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Using the Web Publishing feature with other Web servers

The Web Publishing feature installs the Web Folders object, which can be used when an Office 2000 client is connected to any Web server that has Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions installed or any Web server that supports the Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV) Internet protocol.

FrontPage Server Extensions can be installed on most popular Web servers, including those running the UNIX operating system.

The Web servers on which you can use FrontPage Server Extensions are listed below.

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Using Office with a Netscape Web server

When a Web server sends a document to a Web browser, the Web server must send the document in the correct format. In most cases, this format is HTML; however, Office also allows documents to be sent in Office document format.

Some Web server applications, such as IIS, store Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) content type and file name extension mappings in the Windows registry. These MIME settings allow the Web server to send Office 2000 documents in the original document format — rather than as plain text.

By contrast, some Web servers, such as the Netscape Commerce Server and FastTrack Server, store MIME settings in a file named Mime.types. This different mapping convention sometimes prevents Netscape Web servers from delivering Office documents accurately.

To ensure that Office 2000 documents are delivered accurately, you must add Office MIME type information to the Mime.types files on your Netscape Web server.

Note   Multiple copies of the file named Mime.types might be on your Web server. Use the file search capabilities included with Windows NT Server to locate all the files named Mime.types.

To update Mime.types files

1. On your Web server, locate all the files named Mime.types.
2. Create a backup of each Mime.types file, and store the backups in a safe location.
3. In a text editor such as Notepad, open a Mime.types file.
4. Enter the following lines next to the other file name extension mappings in the Mime.types file:

   type=application/msword exts=doc

   type=application/x-msexcel exts=xls

   type=application/vnd.ms-powerpoint exts=ppt

5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for each copy of the file named Mime.types.

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See also

Upgrading your Web server to run IIS or Personal Web Server significantly enhances your use of OSE. For more information about OSE features and deployment, see Architecture of Office Server Extensions.

The Web Publishing feature of Office 2000 allows users to browse and publish to Web servers as easily as they work with file shares. For more information, see Client Components of Office Server Extensions.

FrontPage Server Extensions enable extended capabilities on your Web sites. For information about installing FrontPage Server Extensions on Web servers other than IIS and Personal Web Server, see the FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions Resource Kit.