If I had one wish for Remote Publishing to IIS...
The feedback from my first query really amazed me. It certainly helps to have real-life viewpoints as well different rationales... because we need to understand what is truly troubling you... not just the symptoms but the underlying cause.
So, I am going to put another hotly debated item up on the block... remote publishing to IIS. Over the years, IIS has steadily gained features and frameworks like ASP and ASP.Net to better service web pages and web services... but it really has not advanced much when it comes to publishing content to that server. In particular:
- FTP Server really languishes the pack in terms of quality and features. The anonymous, non-extensible, and no-frills FTP implementation leaves much to be desired.
- FPSE remains something everyone hates to love. Cryptic and unmanageable, non-scalable, and unreliable implementation makes it an easy target to hate.
- WebDAV suffers from client-side confusion (Windows ships with two different WebDAV Clients in Internet Explorer and Windows Shell with different functionality support... try WebDAV over SSL and see what happens) and sketchy server-side implementation.
Yes, we know the situation is deplorable, but we have limited resources to address this problem space. So, I would like to hear your wishes and desires for remote publishing to IIS. For example:
- If you had to choose ONE way to remote publish content to IIS, which would you choose and WHY? FTP, FTPS, FPSE, WebDAV, something else, or never?
- If we had to cut support for any of those mechanisms, which would be ok and WHY (no, not because you're not using it... ;-) but WHY should it just disappear).
- What sort of features in remote publishing do you deem most important?
- Support for non-NT Users and User Isolation
- Custom Authentication/Authorization extensibility
- FTP over SSL
- Kerberized FTP
- Etc
- Maybe we should just give up and rely on Sharepoint instead?
Ok, enough hints from me. I want to know what you think.
//David