Complete Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Using Netshare
Chapter 2 About Web Server Publishing
Chapter 3 Installing and Configuring
Chapter 4 Web Publisher Quickstart
Chapter 5 Services and Menus
Chapter 6 Search
Chapter 7 Access Control
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Chapter 2 About Web Server Publishing

Web Publisher is a Java applet that runs on your local desktop and interacts with files managed by iPlanet Web Server. With Web Publisher, you can directly access, edit, and manage documents stored on remote servers. Members of workgroups can seamlessly collaborate on project content from their desktops. Web Publisher allows you to publish a document to the appropriate web server with the click of a button, without using ftp commands or other complex interfaces.

This chapter introduces these features of Web Publisher and provides an overview of web server publishing:


File Management
Web Publisher allows you to manage remote server files and folders. You have easy access to the server's files and folders through a hierarchical list in the Web Publisher file management window. You can copy, move, rename, and delete files and directories. You can also download server files to your local system and upload your local files to the server.

Each file and folder on the server has a set of properties that describe information about a file such as its filename, owner, lock status, size, and creation date, and this information is updated whenever the file is edited or added to the server.

You can perform a search on any of these file properties. For example, you can search for all files that belong to a certain author, for all the locked files, or for any file with a particular string in the title field.


Editing and Publishing
With Web Publisher, you can edit server files in a variety of different formats, automatically launching the application associated with the file, such as Netscape Composer for HTML files, Adobe Acrobat for PDF files, and Microsoft Excel for spreadsheet files.

You can configure Web Publisher to associate an editor program with a specific file type. For example, if you edit an HTML file or an ASCII file, Web Publisher defaults to opening the file in a Netscape HTML editor. If you edit a non-HTML file, Web Publisher launches the application associated with that file type. For example, if Microsoft Excel is associated with files that use the .xls extension, when you edit such files, Microsoft Excel is launched and you can work in Excel, saving the file as usual when you are done making changes.

When you edit a server file, Web Publisher places a small pen icon next to it in the Web Publisher applet window. During the edit, the file is in an "edit state," which locks it so that other users cannot write to it, although they can still browse it. To make your new changes publicly available to other users on the server, you must publish the edited file back to the server. This updates the server file and makes it available to other users again.

As part of the process of publishing an edited file back to the web server, Web Publisher performs these tasks:


Search
With Web Publisher, you can search through the contents and file properties of documents on a remote server. For example, you can search for documents created after a certain date or for documents that contain the word web.

For more information about the Web Publisher search function, see Chapter 6, "Using Search."


Controlling Access
Web Publisher lets you control access to your Web Publisher files and folders. You can permit different users to have different types of access to your files and folders (for example, allowing one user only to read files, while another user can write or delete your files). You can define which documents an agent can monitor and you can restrict which documents you can search through.

For more information about setting access permissions, see Chapter 7, "Controlling Access."

 

© Copyright © 2000 Sun Microsystems, Inc. Some preexisting portions Copyright © 2000 Netscape Communications Corp. All rights reserved.