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.