Lotus Notes? Microsoft Internet products? Netscape? The host of smaller, specialized product vendors? Just which products should we base our Web site on? We have business relationships with all three, and have recommended products from all three major companies as appropriate to our clients.
Our consultancy runs in a Windows world: Windows 95 (OSR2) on desktops and laptops, Windows NT 4.0 on servers. Occasionally, we'll engage an associate who's a "Macolyte," and manage to integrate their Mac into our network. The heart of our business runs on Lotus Notes (currently R4.6). It's our primary mail and communications medium, and we keep our corporate contacts, assets, knowledge bases and projects in Notes, so everyone is up-to-date as often as they can dial their local ISP (see Mobile Notes for more).
Carol Anne decided, since we're going to install a new server, to adopt a Microsoft-based solution. It's a choice many of our clients have made, so we should be conversant with the benefits and problems they face. So, we have one server at the hub of the company running Lotus Notes, and the server presenting our "face" to the world running Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS 2.0).
We searched for something that would allow us to build a nice-looking, easy-to-maintain, comprehensive and robust Web presence. At the time (early November, 1997), we were confident we'd just bring this site up in a couple of weeks (ah, ignorance is bliss!), so we picked a simple tool: Microsoft's FrontPage. At that time, FrontPage 97 was at hand, and FrontPage 98 was in Beta. We opted for the FP98 beta.
Now, having learned about the limitations of FrontPage, we've started investigating the features of Visual InterDev 97. But, the complexity of that tool seems more than we need, now that we've learned how to get around some of FP98's more egregious faults. Time will tell.
In the computer industry, we've learned to live with bugs, and their corollary, updates and upgrades. We try to keep up on the latest versions of products, both to minimize the effects of bugs that updates fix, and to become conversant with the latest features of products.
It's a never-ending battle, and it's not easy to keep current. There's no one place to look for all updates for all systems that we've found to be reliable. So, as policy, as we use a product several times in a week, we check the product's home site to see if there're any updates. Just yesterday we got fixes to the Internet Explorer 4.0 that stopped it from crashing every hour or so. Here's a reference to where we get our current Upgrades and Updates for major products