Newbie: ASP v.s. HTML in an INTRANET envrionment

[Guest]

T.I.A. to whomever...

I'm experienced with programming but am new to internet/intranet design and
would like someone else's input to whether the way I'm doing something is
good or bad.

Someone has already designed an INTRANET using FrontPage (html) and used an
Excel file for reading/writing data (in Excel files). They asked me if I
could remove this and replace it with something else that was not dependent
upon MS Office being installed. I thought that using html/forms for input
and updating might be a good approach, but this would involve them
installing IIS and using ASP. I copied their system-files created from
FrontPage and tried a few ASP forms from within their system, just updating
text files on the server (my own PC) and it seems to work fairly well,
although I'm not using FrontPage on my PC. I accessed it from another PC on
my home network and it worked, but I had to use the 'http://nnn.nn.nn.nn (IP
address) protocol.

Since this is only going to be an INTRANET, is there a way to process the
input from html WITHOUT ASP?

If I use the ASP approach, would there be any conflicts with FrontPage? Is
FrontPage merely a web-design tool?


thanks

 

[Raterus]

I think you missed as far as the correct group to post this question in, but I'll give you my two cents worth.

Yes, Frontpage is just a tool used to develop webpages. Yes there is another way, use asp.net , as far as processing dynamic pages on an intranet using IIS, you really just have ASP/ASP.net.

 

[Juan Romero]

Well, no offense my friend, but evidently, you ARE NOT experienced with
programming, or at least not with WEB programming.

Anyways:

- If they have web pages running in an Intranet, then they ALREADY have a
web server running, most likely IIS.
- FrontPage can be used as a simple HTML editor or by actually connecting to
the server extensions.
- ASP (active server pages) is an ISAPI filter installed in IIS.
- This project will not "only be an INTRANET". Intranets can be twice as
complicated and harder to maintain than Internet Sites.
- If you need logic to process the data submissions, then you need to use
ASP, or at least something that can do server side processing, like PHP,
etc.
- You will not have any conflicts between FrontPage and ASP. FrontPage is a
design tool, for which Microsoft created "FrontPage Server Extensions" which
are basically filters that receive commands from FrontPage through the web
server, and perform specific actions like creating new web pages, updating
them, etc, etc, allowing you to work on your web site remotely ( I will not
go into details on that).

Answer: Yes, use ASP.

Good luck!