Macromedia Goes Lite With Contribute

Looking to expand its footprint by targeting the non-techie market, Macromedia Inc. on Monday rolled out a new desktop application that lets IT managers delegate Web site editing responsibilities.

Macromedia Contribute puts the company's flagship Dreamweaver software before a brand-new audience by allowing IT managers to set role-based privileges for non-technical users to edit a Web site in minutes -- without HTML coding skills.

Macromedia is styling Contribute as the easiest way to update content for any HTML website, including sites built in Dreamweaver MX, Microsoft FrontPage and other Web tools.

Ideally, the company is targeting the enterprise clients looking to save on valuable IT staffing resources. By setting privilege levels to limit what a non-tech employee can edit on a site, the company is pushing Macromedia Contribute as a tool to save time and costs to fix minor problems on a corporate Web site.

Macromedia, known mostly for its Flash technology, has embraced the drag-and-drop concept with the Contribute application. Non-technical users looking to update a site can preview the page while editing and publish directly to the live site without complicated Web publishing procedures.

The took has been tied into popular word processing software like Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel to allow files to be dragged and dropped into the Web template.

To avoid crucial mishaps, Macromedia Contribute cannot edit a site's graphic files or text content from within databases.

Macromedia Contribute rolls out in minutes using encrypted connection keys and permission groups and maintains a history of page changes so users can easily roll back changes and switch between different versions of a page.