Enterprise Web Manager is designed to be as big as you need it to be. If one server can't respond fast enough, you can add another. Having multiple servers does not mean having multiple copies of your Web site. Web sites are large, and it isn't always convenient to replicate everything at every site. Instead, Aziza Enterprise Web Manager lets you replicate the most accessed pages for each location. The pages that aren't stored on the server are fetched automatically from the appropriate server across the WAN.

I split up our Web site and stored components on different servers, while Aziza Enterprise Web Manager handled the rest, providing the same data through all servers. When a user c hanges a page that is replicated, it is immediately updated on every server that it's stored on.

Detour: Road Closed One of the major problems with today's large Web sites involves keeping links pointing to the correct place. Continual site development and updating breaks links, but not with Enterprise Web Manager. All documents are stored in the Web Object Manager, Aziza's back-end database, which provides more flexibility in link management. All pages contain logical associations to other database entries instead of the URLs of those pages, unlike DynaBase which directly stores the URL.

With any system, there is no way to update the links that someone else has to your pages. You don't want to leave these people out in the cold. Aziza Enterprise Web Manager keeps track of the old URL for a file when it is moved.

With all of the power it provides, you would think that Aziza Enterprise Web Manager is difficult to use. I had no problem using the system once it was set up, and I actually found it quite intuitive. The Administrator's Console supplies all the functions available in Web Manager to the administrat or or an author on a 32-bit Windows platform. Permissions are set on each file or folder and inherited from the parent folder.

In addition, administrators can use the console to replicate data and move it around on servers. The different views are easy to navigate, and most of the functions are implemented in drag and drop. There are no secret arcane commands to do anything: Enterprise Web Manager is straightforward.

David Daly is a network administrator at Syracuse University. He can be reached at ddaly@syr.edu.