[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change]

# 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:

- Manipulate resources in a WebDAV publishing directory on your server. For example, with this feature, users with the correct permissions can copy and move files around in a WebDAV directory.
- Modify properties associated with certain resources. For example, a user can write to and retrieve a file's property information.
- Lock and unlock resources so that multiple users can read a file concurrently, but only one person at a time can modify the file.
- Search the content and properties of files in a WebDAV directory.

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 Whistler Professional, Windows Whistler Server, or Windows Whistler 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.

- Windows Whistler connects to a WebDAV server through the Add Network Place Wizard and displays the contents of a WebDAV directory as if it were part of the same file system on your local computer. Once connected, you can drag and drop files, retrieve and modify file properties, and do many other file-system tasks.
- Internet Explorer 5 connects to a WebDAV directory and lets you do the same file-system tasks as you can through Windows Whistler.
- Office 2000 creates, publishes, edits, and saves documents directly into a WebDAV directory through any application in Office 2000.

## 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 Whistler and IIS, 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 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 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 Windows Whistler Server documentation.

In addition, IIS supports Digest authentication and Advanced Digest authentication. Created for Windows domain servers, Digest and Advanced 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. For information about Advanced Digest Authentication, see Advanced Digest Authentication and Configuring Advanced Digest Authentication.

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