Password Protection Questions

[Erin Cox-Holmes]

Hi: on my website I need to be able to post the minutes of Presbytery
meetings, which must only be accessible to presbytery members.

Currently, I put them up as password protected pdfs. This has the advantage
of being the simplest: we issue the password to the presbytery, change it
periodically, and it saves me a lot of authentication headaches. The drawback
is it makes the minutes not searchable (say somebody wants to do a search to
discover when the pby adopted a mileage policy, etc.)

My site is constructed in FP2003, with server extenstions and IIS on the
webhost.

My understanding is that if I wanted to create a password protected "area"
on the website, that the best solution would be to create a "secure" subweb,
and enter the headache of either issuing the entire pby a username and
password, or to go the individual username/password route, and add them
individually as permitted users.

1) Is this the best solution for a "secure" area on a website?
2) Is I went the subweb route, once somebody had been authenticated for log
in, would the subweb be searchable for someone logged in? Would it not be
searchable for someone not logged in (I am assuming I would then put the
minutes up as non-passworded pdfs within the passworded subweb.)

Any advice about the simplest and most graceful way to establish a secure
but searchable (for authorized users) "area" on the website would be most
gratefully appreciated.

Erin Cox-Holmes

 

[Erin Cox-Holmes]

Pdf's are searchable when opened by Adobe.

Yes--The issue is that if someone asks "What meeting was it where we set the
mileage policy?" , there's no way for them to search accross documents
without opening and searching each one.

thanks for the answer.

 

[Erin Cox-Holmes]

HTML then...in a protected subweb.Thanks. Wasn't there a project afoot to expand searchability via google to
pdf format?

I just tried a google search on my site in unprotected pdfs, and it caught
only a few of the documents it should have.

thanks again for the answer on the password best route

Erin

 

[Thomas A. Rowe]

Google does index PDF files, but any content that is accessible via a login, then no search engine
will index the content. If you site is host on a Windows IIS server with Index Server, maybe you can
get your host to install the Adobe Acrobat component, which will allow Index Server to index PDFs.

--
==============================================
Thomas A. Rowe (Microsoft MVP - FrontPage)
WEBMASTER Resources(tm)

FrontPage Resources, WebCircle, MS KB Quick Links, etc.
==============================================


Google search within a pdf??? Dunno...kinda doubt it.

You know that you can install Google on your site...it'll search your site or the web. But within
and pdf?? hmm...


| > HTML then...in a protected subweb.
| >
| Thanks. Wasn't there a project afoot to expand searchability via google to
| pdf format?
|
| I just tried a google search on my site in unprotected pdfs, and it caught
| only a few of the documents it should have.
|
| thanks again for the answer on the password best route
|
| Erin