Setting Up Files and Web Sites for Offline Access - Page 2

Caching Web Pages

As I mentioned earlier, you can also make Web sites available for offline use. For example, you might like to take a copy of your company's Web site with you when you go on business trips. To make a page available offline, you must first add it to your favorites. To do so, go to the desired page and select Add To Favorites from Internet Explorer's Favorites menu.

Next, return to the Favorites menu and right-click on the Web site you've just added. Select Make Available Offline from the resulting context menu. At this point, you'll see the Offline Favorite Wizard.

Begin by clicking Next to get through the wizard's introduction screen. Next, you'll see a screen similar to the one shown in Figure 2. By default, the wizard makes only a single page of the Web site available for offline use. However, you can make the entire site available offline, if you wish.

Figure 2: You can make a Web site available for offline viewing.

To do so, click Yes to make the page's links valid. You can then use the dialog box's counter to tell Internet Explorer how many layers deep you want to make available offline. If you make enough layers available offline, you can download an entire Web site. Be careful about doing that, though--some Web sites are huge, and trying to download the entire thing can cause you to run low on hard disk space.

Click Next to continue. The next screen informs you that you can update the page any time you're online by selecting Tools|Synchronize. However, you can also use this screen to establish an automatic synchronization schedule.

After deciding on your synchronization schedule, click Next. The wizard's final screen asks if the Web site requires a password, and gives you the opportunity to supply one. When you complete the process, Internet Explorer will begin downloading the page for offline use.

Conclusion

In this series, I've explained that mobile users sometimes need access to network resources and Web sites when no network or dial up connection is available. In answer to this problem, Windows 2000 offers several ways to make files, folders, programs, and Web sites available for offline use through caching. In my discussion, I've explained the pros and cons to each type of offline caching, as well as the setup procedures for each. //

Brien M. Posey is an MCSE who works as a freelance writer. His past experience includes working as the director of information systems for a national chain of health care facilities and as a network engineer for the Department of Defense. Because of the extremely high volume of e-mail that Brien receives, it's impossible for him to respond to every message, although he does read them all.