Site Server 3.0 (5-client)

Rating:
Summary: Great stuff - but not for the faint-hearted!
Review: Site Server and it's big sister ECommerce Edition do just about everything any website wants to do. These facilities include Personalisation and Membership, Content Deployment, Searching Multiple Websites and File Locations, Personalised Direct Mailings and a Knowledge Management application. It has a full set of analysis tools that are easy to use and produce useful information and not just pretty pictures.

Standard Site Server is primarily aimed at intranet solutions but can be equally easily used for non-ecommerce applications. It would be fair to say that it is complete overkill for many intranet solutions unless you use the direct mailing to staff or want to create a centralised document store of some form. It is not, however, aimed at being a complete document management solution. However, most people have now realised that websites or intranets and just another communication media for your staff or client community and so this product is useful for second generation sites that want to go the extra mile.

A lot of the database work is aimed towards SQL Server but the documentation in both Microsoft manuals and third-party books on proper SQL integration is sketchy or contains errata. The product is also so complex that you have to read every line of the Wrox books to make sure you don't make mistakes.

Securing your site under NT also create its problems. Part of that is the underlying NT OS and a significant section is the sheer scale of the product. Wrox books on P&M have some information on securing LDAP servers etc., but I have yet to see a 'bible' on security covering this product in particular and IIS in general.

Microsoft also seem to have no upgrade pricing when moving from Site Server to ECommerce Edition so carefully evaluate whether to spend the extra money now on ECommerce. It is easy not to activate the commerce pipelines until you are ready.

To summarise, implementing this product can scale to a major undertaking but the payback on a correctly implemented site is worth the effort.