Managing Sites on Your Intranet with FrontPage

Using Workgroup Properties to Manage Web Files

Building and maintaining a Web site often involves many people who contribute Web pages that are created in more than one Microsoft Office application. Keeping track of page status, and who is working on each page, represents a significant challenge for Web site administrators.

Microsoft FrontPage 2000 makes it easy to manage a Web project of any size because you can set one of three new workgroup properties for any Web page created in FrontPage or Microsoft Word 2000. You can set the value of the following three properties in your FrontPage or Word files:

• Assigned to
• Review status
• Category

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Tracking page status and assigned author for any page

The Assigned to and Review status workgroup properties allow you to identify the status and assigned author for each page in a Web project. The Assigned to property assigns a particular person or group to a Web page. The Review status property specifies which phase the page is in.

In FrontPage and Word 2000, you can apply workgroup properties to each Web page. That way, you can keep track of the authorship and status of many of the Web pages that make up a FrontPage-based web.

To specify the Assigned to and Review status properties to a page in FrontPage

1. On the View menu, click Folders.
2. In the right pane, right-click the file for which you want to specify workgroup properties, click Properties, and then click the Workgroup tab.
3. In the Assigned to box, select the name of the person to whom you want to assign the file.
4. In the Review status box, select the current status of the file.

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Using categories to link new Web pages on the fly

In versions of Office earlier than Office 2000, a user can create a Web page by using any Office application and then save it to a FrontPage-based web. However, an administrator has to create links from an existing page in the FrontPage-based web, such as a home page, to the new page.

FrontPage 2000 dynamically generates a link from an existing page on a FrontPage-based web to a new page saved on the same web — at the moment a visitor opens the Web site in a browser.

To have FrontPage generate a link dynamically, you need to specify a value for the Category property for each page you save on a Web site. A category is a way to classify pages that contain related information. Examples of categories are Business, Expense Reports, and Goals/Objectives. In FrontPage and Word 2000, a category is a property of a page.

Here’s how dynamic linking works. You select a page, perhaps a home page, on which you want links to related pages to appear dynamically. Then you specify the category of pages that you want the home page to link to. When a visitor opens the home page, FrontPage adds a link to each page that belongs to the specified category.

You can specify more than one category of pages for the home page to link to, in which case FrontPage generates a separate list of links for each category. The home page automatically links to any page you save to the Web site, providing that page belongs to a category that the home page recognizes. If you remove a page from the Web site, the home page link to the deleted page disappears automatically.

Note   Only FrontPage allows you to modify a category list.

To create a list of dynamically generated links to a specific category of pages

1. Open the page to which you want to add links to other pages, and then switch to Page view.
2. On the Insert menu, point to Component, and then click Categories.
3. In the Sort files by box, click Date Last Modified to sort the list by file dates.

   – or –

   Click Document Title to sort the list alphabetically by title or by file name.

4. To include modification dates in the generated links, select the Date the file was last modified check box.
5. To include comments in the generated links, select the Comments added to the file check box.

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See also

You can use Word to set workgroup properties when publishing documents on a FrontPage-extended web. For more information, see Using Office with a Web Server.