On most websites, there is a barrier between the people who want to update and publish content to the site and the website itself. Content eventually becomes out of date, improvements remain undone, and new information languishes unpublished—waiting for precious design time or development budget before going live. For corporate websites, this requires large budgets to fund the work; for intranets or smaller sites, this often means doing the work when there's time—which means not doing it at all.

The Macromedia Web Publishing System solves this intractable problem by offering a scalable approach that works for large and small organizations alike. This affordable solution provides everything an organization needs to build, manage, and publish to websites. The Web Publishing System meets the needs of web developers, IT managers, and business professionals, empowering users easily to publish to the web within a centrally controlled, standards-based environment.

The Web Publishing System includes three key elements: market-leading Macromedia Studio MX 2004 with Flash Professional for web developers; new, award-winning Macromedia Contribute 3 with FlashPaper 2 for non-technical website publishing; and new, server-based Contribute Publishing Services for central administration by web and IT managers. Perhaps most importantly, with a starting price of less than $2,500 to empower 10 users plus one developer, the WPS provides all of this at an affordable price, allowing IT purchasers to buy only what they need and begin using it immediately.

Eliminated Bottlenecks

Organizations have been challenged by the web content management problem since the first website was published. Many still rely on webmasters and web teams to maintain the site, which creates a bottleneck that frustrates and delays business managers and hassles the web team with never-ending maintenance duties.

Some organizations attempt to teach non-technical managers how to use website-building products like Microsoft FrontPage but those tools require significant technical training to use effectively and do not offer critical administrative and HTML code controls needed to manage users and protect the design and functionality of the website.

Web content management systems often promise the nirvana of central control and broad-based empowerment but the majority of those systems fail to deliver because of their technical complexity, expensive up-front licensing costs, and daunting implementation. Even successful, custom-built dynamic systems suffer from two major shortcomings: They usually do a poor job of flexibly handling unstructured content and they do not give content contributors the intuitive, true visual editing and rich content creation experience they expect.

The Web Publishing System is a radical alternative to these traditional solutions: It's easy to use, it's affordable, and it works. This new solution distributes web publishing capabilities throughout an organization and across enterprises so that business managers can make changes themselves or delegate updates to others.

The affordable price and flexible architecture make it a perfect stand-alone solution for intranets and small to midsized business websites. It can also be used to complement existing systems and fill in their gaps. For example, it can be used to manage unstructured content that does not lend itself well to dynamic systems, or used as an intuitive front end for editing content stored in file-based content management systems, such as Interwoven TeamSite.

Integrated with Existing Macromedia Products

The Web Publishing System builds on extensive efforts by Macromedia to integrate its products deeply and create a comprehensive solution to today's website problems. Integration points range from Dreamweaver templates that protect page integrity when used by Contribute users to Fireworks integration that facilitates powerful image editing in both Dreamweaver and Contribute. The results are heavily leveraged in the Web Publishing System, making website publishing straightforward and approachable, and allowing over two million web professionals already familiar with Dreamweaver and Studio to use the Web Publishing System to collaborate effectively with the non-technical business professionals who contribute content to the sites they build and manage.

Many of the core innovations of the Web Publishing System lie in the new Contribute 3 release, which truly takes the product to the next level and allows for unprecedented scalability, affordability, and ease of use. Improvements include a new approval and review system, dramatically enhanced performance, full support for CSS and CSS-P, an integrated image editor, and completely re-architected and enhanced administrative controls.

Contribute 3 includes new customization and extensibility features that are valuable for large deployments. With Contribute 3 it is possible to extend Contribute using the same APIs available for Dreamweaver extensions and create customized installers suitable for remote deployment across an enterprise. This means you can create your own version of Contribute with branded elements or entirely new custom features.

The new Contribute Publishing Services server component included with the Web Publishing System allows web and IT managers to manage users, roles, and website editing permissions from a central location. This new lightweight application is easily installed in minutes on Windows, Linux, and Unix servers, or easily deployed to standard J2EE application environments. It enables administrators to manage access to websites centrally, integrate with enterprise systems using LDAP and Active Directory user directories, and track publishing activities across large numbers of websites and publishers.

Contribute Publishing Services tracking takes advantage of a new web services–based notification feature in Contribute 3 that allows partners to create server-side extensions. All editing and publishing activities taken by the Contribute client can be published via SOAP to a server and then processed as needed to drive page deployments, send notifications, generate reports, or trigger any other required server-side actions.

The new release of Contribute also integrates Macromedia FlashPaper 2, a dramatic update to this exciting document sharing technology now included on both Mac OS and Windows. The printer-driver technology behind FlashPaper 2 generates enhanced Flash documents (SWF files) with full text search and selection, bookmarking, and hyperlinking. The Flash document user interface includes a new, extended ActionScript API. FlashPaper 2 integrates directly with Microsoft Office and on Windows the FlashPaper 2 printer driver can even generate Adobe PDF files.

New Business Opportunities

The Web Publishing System offers web agencies a range of new business opportunities. The system encourages clients to engage in web projects to revamp existing sites or build out new extranets and intranets. The system's affordable price makes projects possible for more customers than ever—from small organizations to departmental intranets. Used in conjunction with custom-built dynamic systems, it maintains site sections that are easily treated as page-based or static content and focuses dynamic efforts on transactional applications and catalog-type database content.

By focusing first on the needs of non-technical individuals who must publish content to websites without putting website integrity at risk, the Macromedia Web Publishing System finally unlocks the power of web publishing for everyone within an organization who needs to communicate information to others. Now organizations can communicate internally through intranets or externally through corporate websites, government agencies can publish policies and procedures to their constituencies, and educational institutions can publish campus-wide e-learning and academic websites.

Learn more about the Macromedia Web Publishing System and try out a newly available preview version of the solution at www.macromedia.com/go/wps.

About the author