The WebDAV Internet Draft is a set of extensions to HTTP 1.1 that will provide a standard for authoring and version control independent of the authoring tool you happen to be using. The specification has the backing of IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Novell and Xerox, amongst others. FrontPage authors can use an automatic process to ensure the host is up to date, but only if the host supports the FrontPage extensions. WebDAV eliminates the need for both manual uploads and proprietary extensions. Locking prevents more than one person working on a document at the same time.
Collections pulls together the various components that go to make up a Web page into a single place.
As such, it is difficult for team members using authoring tools from one vendor to save documents authored with other tools on Web servers without custom server side components. To help overcome this, Steve explained how WebDAV will work behind the scenes over HTTP, allowing Web authors to access and save Web documents on any Web server in a universal way. Remote folders and documents can appear as local files to the users of the WebDAV-enabled applications. Servers and client-side applications that support WebDAV can manipulate collections of documents and retrieve properties on those documents in a consistent manner. Steve stated that a future version of FrontPage would use WebDAV to reach servers that don't support FrontPage server extensions.