No real alternative yet for FrontPage Server Extension

After days of frustrating analysis, my conclusion at the moment is to stay with the now-has-become-a-third-party-product FPSE.

My requirements are:

1. I, the server administrator, do not want to do much. I do not want to be called to intervene each time a web site is to be created. Once I have appointed developer A for admin of web site host/siteA, I do not want to have to intervene for host/siteA/siteA1 etc. Moreover, when he has got a colleague who assumes the same role as him, he could do the necessaries.
2. Operations for developers such as managing the web site permission, deploy their codes, should be straightforward.

With FPSE on a 2003 box, it has been near perfect. Except for one thing. No means that developers can verify if a folder is setup as “application”. They can turn a folder into an application, but cannot verify.

The story started when we start thinking of upgrading our web server, currently IIS6 on 2003 box, to IIS7.5 on 2008 R2. Soon I came to know that FPSE is no more supported. There is one as a third party product, but not from MS. Not yet for IIS7.5 but it is said to become available soon.

What is then the MS’s alternative? None that I can see.

Visual Studio 2010 supports the followings for code deployment.

1. FPSE
2. FTP
3. Network share
4. Web Deploy # Only for Web Application Projects
5. WebDAV # Some say you could, by mapping it as (or like) a network drive.

I do not know if you agree. But to me, 2 and 3 seem going back to the stone age.

4. Web Deploy should be the first choice. It is new so must be better. But some say that converting a web site project to web application is not as straightforward as you may think. In addition, it does not fulfill one of my requirements above. The server administrator has to do whole a lot!!

If I setup the “Application” host/siteA for developer A, he could autonomously do the child application host/siteA/siteA1, by importing the siteA1 application with the IIS7 Remote Administration. (I so far fail to do the same with VS though) But he cannot give the permission to his colleagues by himself. It is understandable. When the server administrator setup an application, he needs to not only configure IIS Manager Permission but folder permission as well, while with FPSE you do all these in one go.

Finally, 5. WebDAV too appears to have the same shortcoming, lacks the permission management delegation capability that we want. It is said “The IIS7.* WebDAV extension module supports per-URL authoring rules, allowing administrators to specify custom WebDAV security settings on a per-URL basis.” But as it reads, it is for (server) administrators only. When you connect to a site or an application, with the IIS7 Remote Administration, you do not have the WebDAV Authoring Rules icon. And to connect to the server (then you have the icon), you need to be the administrator...

And above all, needing to map WebDAV folders for publishing web sites from VS does not sound to me an optimum solution...