About WebDAV

Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) extends the HTTP/1.1 protocol to allow clients to publish, lock, and manage resources on the Web. Integrated into IIS, WebDAV allows clients to do the following:

Setting up a WebDAV publishing directory on your server is as straightforward as setting up a virtual directory through the IIS snap-in. Once you have set up your publishing directory, users with the correct permissions can publish documents to the server and manipulate files in the directory. Before you can set up a WebDAV directory, you must install Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server, or Windows 2000 Advanced Server.

WebDAV Clients

You can access a WebDAV publishing directory through one of the Microsoft products described in the following list or through any other client that supports the industry standard WebDAV protocol.

Searching in WebDAV

Once connected to a WebDAV directory, you can quickly search the files on that directory for content as well as properties. For example, you can search for all files that contain the word table or for all files written by Fred.

Integrated Security

Because WebDAV is integrated with Windows 2000 and IIS 5.0, it borrows the security features offered by both. These features include the IIS permissions specified in the IIS snap-in and the discretionary access control lists (DACLs) in the NTFS file system. For information about IIS 5.0 security, see Security.

Because clients with proper permissions can write to a WebDAV directory, it is vital that you can control who is accessing your directory at all times. To help control access, IIS 5.0 has reinforced Integrated Windows authentication by building in support for the Kerberos 5 authentication protocol. By selecting Integrated Windows authentication, you can make sure that only clients with permission can access and write to the WebDAV directory on your intranet. For more information about how the Kerberos 5 authentication protocol works with IIS Integrated Windows authentication, see Integrated Windows Authentication. For information about how the Kerberos protocol works in general, see "Kerberos v5 Authentication" in the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server documentation.

In addition, IIS 5.0 introduces a new type of authentication called Digest authentication. Created for Windows domain servers, this type of authentication offers tighter security for passwords and for transmitting information across the Internet. For information about Digest authentication, see Digest Authentication and Configuring Digest Authentication.


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