FrontPage 2003 Targets Data-Driven Web Sites

The latest version of FrontPage, Microsoft’s Web content creation tool, includes new capabilities for creating data-driven Web sites, which generate pages and links from external data sources such as databases. Page design and coding features have also improved significantly. Microsoft hopes FrontPage 2003 (FP2003) will appeal both to nontechnical users and professional developers and compete more strongly with products such as Macromedia’s Dreamweaver. To be successful, Microsoft will have to convince Web developers that FrontPage is more than a lightweight tool for authoring simple, static Web pages, which is its primary use today.

FP2003 is particularly useful for creating and customizing sites for Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), a free add-on service to Windows Server 2003 for hosting team collaboration Web sites; in fact, many of the product’s new data-driven features require WSS and Windows Server 2003. This focus could help Microsoft drive adoption of related server products but is a departure from previous FrontPage versions, which are used to create content for both Windows and non-Windows–based Internet Web sites, and could limit the product’s appeal to designers targeting other Web platforms.