Publish Web Easy

When Microsoft released Office 2007, Microsoft FrontPage was conspicuous by its absence. Its place has been taken by Microsoft Expression Web, a product which clearly aims to take some of Adobe Dreamweaver's huge share of the web design market. For once Microsoft finds itself playing the role of underdog and is sensibly adopting some of the tactics used by Adobe in gaining their dominant position in web design software.

Like Dreamweaver, Expression Web forms part of a software bundle, in this case, Expression Studio. Microsoft were the ones who introduced the concept of software bundles, so no one can accuse them of copying the Adobe Creative Suite. Expression Studio contains a full version of Visual Studio 2005 Standard, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and, of course, Expression Web. It's not as powerful a suite as any of the various combinations of Adobe Creative Suite, but it's still early days. So, are Microsoft on to a winner here? Could Expression Web ever become a Dreaweaver-killer?

At this stage, one would have to say that it is unlikely to become a Dreaweaver-killer. However, it is a serious contender and will undoubtedly take some of Adobe's market share. Microsoft have created a program which is not simply a reworked version of FrontPage. Expression Web is a standards-compliant development environment which enables web designers to create pages visually and automatically generates the necessary code: XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, XSLT and ASP.Net.

One potential problem which Microsoft will face in attempting to lure users away from Dreamweaver is the fact that Expression Web only runs on PCs. A high proportion of web designers use Apple Mac. Microsoft may find that it's not enough to make Expression Web a little better than Dreamweaver in order to challenge its dominance; they may have to make it a whole lot better!

Both Dreamweaver and Expression Web allow developers to visually generate server-side code. However, both programs have limitations in this department. In the case of Dreamweaver, support for ASP.Net and PHP is fairly limited and the overall server-side functionality has not been enhanced for several years. In the case of Expression Web, only ASP.Net is supported; there is no support for PHP, ColdFusion or JSP.

There are over a million web developers using Adobe Dreamweaver and the program is recognised as the industry-standard in visual web development software. It's maturity in the market place gives the program a huge advantage over Expression Web. Third-party developers have also created hundreds of useful add-ons ("Dreamweaver extensions" ) which provide such features as ecommerce and XML integration to the basic program. Microsoft recognises the importance of add-ons and have given Expression Web similar extensibility but it will be some years before they have any chance of catching up.

In brief, in Expression Web, Microsoft have created a very impressive, professional web development tool which will find a ready market with Microsoft users particularly those who already own FrontPage. However, it's difficult to see existing Dreamweaver users abandoning Adobe's equally excellent product any time soon.