Microsoft Updates FrontPage Beta

Second prerelease version adds image-handling options, monitoring tools.

Gopika Vaidya, IDG News Service

Microsoft is adding new imaging functions and automatic content update functions to its next version of FrontPage, the Web site creation and management software.

Currently code-named FrontPage 10, the program is in its second beta version. It's expected to be released as part of the next version of the Office suite in mid-2001. It provides new tools for Web site creation, control, and management, according to the software giant. (See "A Peek at Office Upgrade.")

With FrontPage 10, you can create and customize the Photo Gallery feature to display photos and images, Microsoft says. You can select different customizable layouts, add captions, reorder and edit images, and switch layouts. Using another feature, the automatic Web content application, you can also insert content and update a Web site without having to edit it.

Impromptu Management Tools

The software also contains updated site management features to track how visitors use a Web site, which pages get the most hits, and how they were referred to it. You can insert a top-10 list of the most popular pages on the Web site, and view the results according to different criteria. Those criteria include pages visited most often, referring domains, referring URLs, search strings, and visitors. The list is automatically refreshed whenever someone visits the page.

Some other new features enable you to collaborate and create Web sites to store, find, and share information, documents, and Web pages, according to Microsoft. With the SharePoint team-collaboration application, you and colleagues also can create intranet pages on the fly, editing content straight from a browser. You can control the appearance and functioning of your HTML code by reformatting HTML pages, specifying color-coding tags, and indenting tags.

A new paste feature lets you choose among formatting from the source page, in the existing Web page, or as text, when you paste content from other applications.