Most of the preliminary work for the Windows web server upgrade is complete. Now comes the hard part—making it happen. We will be holding a meeting to discuss the upgrade on November 7, 2002 at 3:00 p.m. in SCS Conference Rooms A and B (Bldg. 50). Please come with your questions and concerns.

The impact of the upgrade to those who browse the web should be minimal. There will be a short (a few hours, hopefully) outage of each server as the final data transfer and switch takes place.

These outages will be scheduled for off-peak hours, and a notice of the outage times and durations will be sent to the comp-out mailing list, and also posted as an announcement on SLAC’s Detailed and Highlighted home pages.

The other impact is that some web information currently restricted to SLAC-only or group-only access will move to an entirely different server (our intranet server at https://www-internal.slac.stanford.edu/). This could result in some broken bookmarks and links, which could take time to find and fix.

The impact to those who manage web sites will be more significant. By moving restricted webs to a separate server, web site managers will have two distinct webs to manage and links between the webs will need to be fixed. Splitting off the restricted web space must happen before the actual upgrade can occur and I will help with the process.

Webs on the upgraded servers will no longer be available as a Windows server share (as the webs are currently viewable through the Aegis server). The webs on the upgraded servers will be accessible through FrontPage and by using Web Folders (described in http://www.microsoft.com/office/previous/weblife/webfolder.asp).

For those who use FrontPage, the latest server extensions (Version 2002) provide full database integration, check-in/out capabilities, and the ability to create sub-webs with different authoring privileges—very desirable features for web developers and site managers.