FrontPage, Project, Visio Updates

The next version of FrontPage will offer simpler design of dynamic Web sites, while Microsoft’s project management offering (Project) and business diagramming software (Visio) will get incremental improvements. All three releases will come out in fall 2003 as part of a wave of “Office System” products and are designed to integrate with other products in that wave, which in turn could make them more accessible to users.

FrontPage 2003 Strengthens Data-Driven Site Features

FrontPage 2003 repositions the product as a professional Web development tool; Microsoft Publisher will now occupy the low-end Web authoring niche formerly served by FrontPage, and has replaced FrontPage in the Office Edition bundles.

Most important for developers, FrontPage 2003 has more support for data-driven Web sites, which dynamically generate pages from back-end data sources. FrontPage 2003 will support the design of pages generated by XML Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) scripts, as well as pages generated from OLE DB data sources, such as SQL Server databases. An improved Web template mechanism will let designers make changes in one place that propagate through an entire site. Sample sites that use the new capabilities will include a Web log (“blog”) solution, a bug tracking site, and a classroom Web site. FrontPage will also provide a substantially improved client-side script editor.