What happened to Personal Web Server?

We get a lot of questions about Personal Web Server (PWS) and why it's not included with Windows ME or Windows XP Home Edition or how to use it under Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Professional.

The basic answer is that PWS is dead.  Microsoft no longer supports it and it is no longer available for Windows ME or Windows XP Home Edition.  Support for PWS was discontinued in favor of supporting Internet Information Server (IIS) Versions 4.0, 5.0 and soon 6.0.

Although there are many "workarounds" out on the internet to allow you to use PWS on these operating systems it is NOT recommended.  If you want to run a web server locally then you should upgrade to Windows 2000 Professional (or Server) or Windows XP Professional to take advantage of IIS - a full blown web server.

In addition, there is NO support for PWS with the FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions.  This means that even if you did use one of the "workarounds" you still wouldn't be able to take advantage of the new features that require the FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions nor would you be able to install and test out Microsoft SharePoint Team Services.

10:20:42 PM  .