Help Desk
By Chris Condon, guest Webmaster
Intranet Posting For All
Dear Help Desk,
I work for the US Marine Corps, with many nontechnical Marines who create documents (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) that they would like to post to our intranet. I want to set up some kind of directory structure—to which they can save these documents—that will enable IIS to convert them to HTML
without much manual intervention. What do you suggest?
—Stephen
Dear Stephen,
Dividing responsibility for posting intranet updates is problematic, especially when you're dealing with users whose HTML expertise can range from nonexistent to barely passable.
My first thought would be to create a share within your \InetPub\wwwroot directory, and use NTFS permissions to define who is allowed to post files and where. Microsoft Office 98 and 2000 let you save or export documents in HTML format, so the only hurdle is user education. Unfortunately, you're also stuck with a bunch of directory listings of HTML filenames for an intranet. It's not elegant, but it's cheap.
This is one of those times I'd follow Chris' Rule of Web Development #27: When all else fails, throw money at the problem. If you don't have to save the intranet documents in HTML format, what you're really looking for is a Web-based document management solution.
The solution I'm most familiar with is Xerox DocuShare. It happens to run on IIS (or on Solaris with Apache or Netscape Enterprise Server 3.0). It lets you create a hierarchy of folders, called collections, to which your users can save documents and links through a Web interface.
