Congratulations on Leasing your WebPremier NT Digex Web Server!

The Web Server Designed For Windows NT Server

This page is default.htm and when you replace it with your content, it will be lost, so we have saved a second copy under the name digexwelcome.htm. Some documents that may be of interest to you, detailing some of the included features and enhancements are listed here:

This machine is running Microsoft Internet Information Server 3.0 (IIS 3.0) with Active Server Pages. You can use Microsoft® Active Server Pages (ASP) to embed scripts within your HTML pages to create dynamic, interactive content for your Web site. In the past, scripts written in the popular scripting languages VBScript and JScript have been processed by Web browsers that support the language in which the script was written. Active Server Pages enables your Web server to process VBScript and JScript commands. Any browser that can contact your Web server, regardless of its support for VBScript or JScript, can work with ASP and the dynamic output. Modules are being developed that will allow other scripting languages to be plugged in to the server allowing the server to speak those languages (including Perl) with the same fluency. Read Microsoft's docs on ASP. Or try out an ASP enabled site.

Go back to the ASP docs page, look at the search button at the top right, see it? That search button calls the form that uses the Index Server 1.1, another part of IIS 3.0, to search through all the ASP documentation for hits. You can use this same engine to search your content almost anywhere on your server by using this more general form. After you read the Product Documentation on Index Server you'll be ready to give your users queries tailored to their interests. Index server is a simple concept, but very deep in its capabilities. For example, it's not limited just to text or html files. It can read and understand the content in Word Docs and Excel spreadsheets and include them in your indexes. I'm sure you'll appreciate these samples. It can even be administered online (you will need the password.)

Until you get fluent with ASP, you may have existing scripts that run with Perl 5.0. We think you'll be very happy with the performance of Perl under NT, especially if you use the Perl ISAPI dll. You can read an overview of the NT implementation that is included with your Digex NT Series Web Server here. Or you techie folks can go right to the manual.

Less experienced, and even more experienced, people may want to check out Microsoft's FrontPage, the easiest way we know of to quickly create high quality, dynamic web content. You can get a copy of FrontPage almost anywhere, start it up and point it at your webserver here. Your FrontPage application communicates with the FrontPage Server Extensions we have installed on this server. Once you've logged in, creating your web looks and feels just like using Microsoft Word. You can add links, tables, images, search engines, discussion groups, as easily as typing.

But wait, there's more! Once you've created your dynamic, interactive pages, you'll want to see where people are spending their time on your website. At Digex, we report on your statistics nightly using a commercial Web Stats package, and our reports are available here (password, please.)

To actually administer the server and install content, you'll need to connect to it. You can use Frontpage or FTP as mentioned earlier. More sophisticated users may need to get a Netbios connection. To do so, you have two choices. If you have Windows NT 4.0 you can use whatever Internet connection is available to you and then use PPTP (Point to Point Tunneling Protocol) to tunnel through the Internet and connect directly and securely with the server at Digex. (How to PPTP is here.(big document, 240kb, print it out and have it next to you while you configure PPTP.) Microsoft has free PPTP drivers for Windows 95. We have some tips on configuring Win95 to connect to your server. Regardless of which client machine you have, read this note on Netbios shares available to you.  Please read this note on user accounts on your machine.  We have also put a fair number of utilities in a share called digexadmin.  You will need a Netbios connection to get to this share, once you're there, please read the file rktools.hlp for a description of those utilities.   And read this note on Good Web Development Practices.

We have one more feature for you. Most people need to be able to SendMail from their website. Here's a sample email form that will only work if you have a SMTP mail service installed. It's only configured to mail to me (adam@digex.net)but it demonstrates the idea. If you think you can use this, just email me and we'll make the changes necessary. This is freeware and not supported or endorsed by Digex, but if you find it useful, and want to use it, it seems to work. You can download the zip file and read the source code and docs. The folks at NetOne have written a Perl script that works in conjunction with this program.

Please see the Terms and Conditions under which the DIGEXdriven logo can be used on your website.

The links below lead to the Microsoft Documents included as part of IIS.

Microsoft® Internet Information Server (IIS) makes it easier to do business with internal or external customers down the hall or around the world. To learn more about how Internet Information Server will help you in your business, browse the IIS online documentation. You can manage the IIS services from a Web browser. To start the administration tool in your current Web browser, click here. (Note: You must have administrator privileges to use this tool.)

Try the hyperlinks above to see some examples of the content you can publish with Microsoft Internet Information Server. To learn more about Microsoft products that you can use to create great-looking Web pages, visit the Microsoft Web site for information about Microsoft FrontPage and Internet Assistants for Microsoft Office. Microsoft FrontPage is also included on the Windows NT Server CD-ROM. A good place to begin browsing the Internet is www.microsoft.com, where you will find information about Microsoft products. This Web site contains pages that discuss Microsoft Internet Information Server. The Microsoft Web site also provides downloadable versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Another good place to start browsing is The Microsoft Network Web site.