3: Advanced Features
Iosphere is strong when it comes to taking most of the work out of maintaining index lists, back and forward buttons and sitemaps. It has another important feature that is useful if you plan to allow individual departments within your organisation to run different parts of the site. Usually this isn't recommended - letting everybody in an organisation contribute pages can lead to lots of different designs and an overall messy site. Because Iosphere enforces a uniform style, regardless of the state of the original file, the problem is not as great.
Many corporate documents, such as press releases, should be published on the Internet as well as handed out on paper. Many of the existing office suites have an option to save as HTML. Unfortunately this doesn't add navigation bars or give the file a corporate look. Using Iosphere, however, does - it will read existing HTML and add the corporate image without altering the original file.
Networking with Iosphere
If different departments are to manage their own sections of a website it is not viable for them to work from the master Iosphere 2 computer. Instead they need to work somewhere else on a network, synchronizing when necessary. There are three ways to do this, and Iosphere supports all of them:
- Departments place their files on the Iosphere 2 computer over the network
- All files are placed on a central server, where the Iosphere 2 computer can retrieve them.
- Different departments have their files stored on their own computers, where Iosphere 2 can retrieve them.
All of this possible by using the File System Folder object. It allows folders both on disk and across the network to be loaded into Iosphere.
