Macromedia Manages Enterprise Web Publishing

Called Web Publishing System (WPS), the new content creation and management suite includes tools for non-technical business types, for advanced Web designers, and for company IT departments. It can also be scaled up to thousands of users, said Macromedia executives, and pays special attention to bringing content creators into the management mix.

WPS consists of Studio MX 2004, Macromedia's Web design and development package that includes Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks; the new Contribute Publishing, a server-based component for managing access and changes made to corporate Web sites; and Contribute 3, which also updated Monday.

The latter is the cornerstone of the new suite, said Lawson Hancock, the product manager for Contribute 3, and is a way for companies to free high-salaried Web or IT staff from the drudgery of site maintenance.

"Contribute works in a simple browse-as-publish metaphor," Hancock said. "You navigate to site you want to update, click Edit, make your changes, and when you're done, it's published. Any user who understands a browser and say, Microsoft Word can publish content to an existing Web site."

While some companies use a content management system to automate part of the site update process, said Hancock, and others have a dedicated Web team on the payroll, both suffer from bottlenecks as users request changes, some relatively minor, that stack up, creating long delays.

"They're paying Web teams to do cut and paste," said Hancock.

Instead, Contribute lets Dreamweaver designers directly collaborate with the employees who provide the content for the sites those professionals build and manage.

Contribute, along with the Contribute Publishing server software, lets administrators decide who can make changes to what sites, and how extensive those changes can be. "Sections on a page can be locked out so that no one can change, say, the site's navigational controls," said Hancock. The J2EE server, which can be installed on Windows, Linux, or Unix systems, also tracks changes using an encryption key system and provides a new logging function so administrators can audit site modifications.

Other new features in Contribute include an updated version of FlashPaper, the Macromedia utility for converting documents into Flash format for Web use, and an approval system for submitting proposed changes to a higher authority -- a supervisor or the Web design team, for example -- before the new pages go live.

Macromedia's going after the bigger customers with this all-in-one suite, said Hancock, including Fortune 500 firms, federal and state government agencies, and academia. "It comes out of the recognition that we had customers who were using Dreamweaver and Contribute together, and that we needed to create something that addressed the needs for Web publishing in large organizations."

The English version of WPS will ship for Windows and Mac OS X in the second half of August, with pricing based on the number of users. A 10-seat pack costs $2,499, while the 50- and 100-seat packs run $12,495 and $24,990, respectively; all packs include one seat for MX Studio 2004 for each 10 user licenses. A single seat license for WPS is available for $229.

Localized editions for French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish will ship later this year.

This story courtesy of TechWeb.