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DynaBase's dynamic content support was better than the competition's, especially when it came to support for scripts triggered on HTML tags and ease of use. It stands out on the basis of its HTML tools and document-control system. However, one of DynaBase's major drawbacks is its hefty price: $47,000. Both Netscape Enterprise Server and Lotus Domino are considerably less expensive, each coming in at less than $2,000. Also, DynaBase lacks fine-grained access control and cannot prevent users from accessing areas they shouldn't.
DynaBase is comprised of two parts: the application server and the client program. The application server plugs into your Web server through Microsoft's Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) or Netscape's NSAPI, and processes requests for URLs. Multiple clients can then access any application server on your network. The application server runs on either Windows NT or Solaris; the client runs only on Windows. Netscape and Lotus are more flexible, because they run on most platforms for both the client and server.
Access Control Drawbacks We discovered some drawbacks to DynaBase during testing, such as the product's access-control capabilities. DynaBase provides authentication that ties into NT's security with different levels of permissions. The three available roles are author, publisher and administrator. Authors create files and edit them; publishers adjust which files are published; and administrators adjust user permission. Although this system provides most of the permissions we desired, it doesn't offer the granularity we wanted. Any author can work on any file in any directory of the web (DynaBase's content database). The Web management tools from Netscape and Lotus provided access control that could be applied to each...