Part 5: Other considerations.

If you are migrating your web servers to include FrontPage extensions, you may wonder what will happen to users who have already been publishing their site using ftp or trying to install the extensions themselves. Well, fear not because fortunately we didn't have any trouble with this at all when we migrated our setup (this is not to say that you won't, but generally it's going to be true). What we actually did was remove any _vti_* directories in each user's account before installing the extensions we had setup in their account. We did this for each user so that they would not have to request that their extensions be turned on.

First of all, I can't emphasize how much you should simulate the setup of your web servers using FrontPage on a test (non-production) machine, before actually setting them up on a production machine. Things rarely ever go as planned and there are lots of potential gotchas that can creep up if you've been running a server for a while. Especially if you have any "exception" users with special setups. You have to cover all bases and make sure that you know what test cases to use.

If the problem is only coming up for one user and they might have futzed with their extensions, it's best to just re-install their extensions. I've actually written a program to do this. You can use this script as an example and modify it for your setup. You can download it at http://suso.suso.org/presentations/apache_and_frontpage/initfrontpage.pl.

If the problem seems global and affects all of your users, then you probably didn't do enough testing. ;-) The best place to go to find out what possible solutions to your problem may be is the Improved mod_frontpage forum at http://home.edo.uni-dortmund.de/~chripo/.

There you can search through the posts to find people who have possibly had a simular problem. If you can't find it there, then be creative and let others on the forum know of your solution.