Site Server 3.0 Personalization and Membership

Early chapters detail the Lightweight Directory Services Protocol (LDAP), which is the real foundation of membership in Site Server. Active Server Pages (ASP)-based scripts--and even C++ programs--can make use of membership objects using the Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI). The author does a good job of explaining how to install Site Server and related tools, including the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-ins that allow administrators to add membership to Web sites.

Once a Web site can determine who a user is, the guide teaches you how to make use of Active User Objects (AUO) so that you can program ASP to tailor content to individual users. The latter half of this text presents examples for identifying users and personalizing start-up pages for users. Advanced topics include security issues and how to use AUO to simplify administration in Visual Basic and C++. Appendices include a sample working online investment Web site that makes heavy use of personalization, as well as a guide to the ADSI APIs for use in your own programming.

With its detailed technical presentation of Site Server technologies, Site Server 3.0 Personalization and Membership is a must for any Internet Information Server (IIS) administrator or Web developer considering the options for delivering personalized content using Microsoft technologies. --Richard Dragan

Book Description
This book focuses on the Personalization and Membership capabilities of Site Server 3.0, which enable you to do clever things like this: ISP - Use Personalization and Membership to personalize IIS administrative tool using the existing IIS web administration interface, to allow different members to have different administrative privileges; also, to implement user membership on various levels to provide simple display and access privileges as well as integrating with existing applications. Interactive Web Site - Use Personalization and Membership to control the display of the content on a site, thus giving end-users a richer browsing experience. This example theme demonstrates how to incorporate lightweight samples and ideas into their existing web site. Intranet - Use Personalization and Membership in an Intranet site to control access to items on the network. This would be a higher end example of the type of things that Personalization and Membership can do.

With that being said, I do want to commend the author on the amount of ground he's tried to cover. If you are desparately looking for information, having this book will help, if only, with some initial confusion.


A book to get you started... advanced users look elsewhere   June 13, 2000
 2 out of 3 found this review helpful

I purchased this book while developing an intranet for my company. It does a fairly good job to get you started with Personalization and Membership (P&M), but after a while you'll realize that there's still a lot of information missing.

For example, the book speaks nothing of applying filters with ASP or querying the DS using SQL commands or even any other objects other than the Membership.Userobjects. Many of which is vital in developing almost any website with P&M. There's a lot more that I'm just now learning about that I needed to know but this book never explains.

The best way to learn? Until someone decides to write a comprehensive book on P&M, I will continue to use the web administration pages that came with Site Server (the ones that allow you to go through and administer the DS via. the web) as the examples and use this book only as a reference from time to time.

Good luck!


An excellent book to comprehend Personalization & Membership   May 31, 2000
 8 out of 9 found this review helpful

I have read 4 Wrox books on Site Server (Beginning, P&M, Professional and Commerce Edition). This book is definitely the best book out of the above 4 that addresses the P&M architecture is some detail. Items that I find in P&M (e.g., IPDeny, DenyAccount, KEkey) are not even mentioned in other books. Therefore, for directory & file system security, I would have missed this section (unless I read it in another non-Wrox book).

The layout of this book is excellent & it gives loads of examples to explain P&M in detail. (Source code can be downloaded from Wrox so that you can experiment with the examples within the book).

My only complaint was that the Wall Street Investing example (located in the Appendix of P&M) finally worked when:

1. I did NOT register the WSI.dll (For some reason: I was not able to pull content from SQL-Server 7.0 unless it wasn't registered)

2. You MUST migrate [content] data from Access --> SQL-Server. (According to the book--"..You can of course migrate your data from Access to SQL Server at a later stage, but this is an added complication!" Unfortunately, this statement implied to me to create a Db within SQL-Server. However, it did not clearly address using SQL's Data Transformation Services to copy data from Access --> SQL-Server (in order to populate the appropriate tables)

3. Because the book was published in 1998, all SQL-Server screen-shot examples are in 6.5


Pretty good -- could be better   May 26, 2000
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Although this book does a fairly good job to cover the ground with Personalization & Membership (P&M), there's still a lot left unanswered. I found that it is more useful as reference material than actually learning how to program for P&M.

Much of the book is filled with extraneous content, especially if you're an ASP programmer. It would be nice if someone would write a book specifically focused on programming in ASP for P&M as well as explain things a little better than "This is what you type to get it to do this".

Until there's something better out there... you're probably going to have to be satisfied with this.