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by Ted Brockwood
Collaborative Content Management NetObjects has teamed up with developers in the battle to build corporate Web sites with the release of Authoring Server Suite 3.0. With this product, NetObjects is shooting to alleviate the bottleneck created when Webmasters are forced to do all the work of developing and deploying Web content to Internet and Intranet sites.
September 1, 1999
The entire goal of the suite is to take the loosely-connected jumble of HTML, ASP, images, text and other content produced by various departments and glue it all together, making the life of the corporate Webmaster a little easier. By creating a collaboration server, the Webmaster can assign site design/development privileges to users and departments, while restricting code generation to those skilled in handling it. If you're looking for a more team-built site, and don't have the money or resources to buy something as big as StoryServer, you'll strike gold with Authoring Server Suite.
The Authoring Server Suite is broken into several parts:
- The Authoring Server
- Authoring Server Administrator
- The Contributor Client
- The Team Fusion Client
The Authoring Server and the Administrator are obviously to be installed on the Web server and the installation is to be handled by someone with domain admin rights to the server. The Authoring Server is pretty straightforward - it's an SQL database containing all the site information including images, pages, objects and other site-specific elements. It is important to note that although the Authoring Server uses an SQL database, you do not need Microsoft SQL server installed on your server - the necessary SQL server components come with the product. This mini-SQL server is not designed to be used for any other purpose except the Authoring Server, so don't expect to use it to serve up the rest of your databases. Authoring Server installs quickly and painlessly on an NT system (Workstation or Server 4.0 with Service Pack 3) that meets the memory and processor requirements. There really is nothing complex about this installation - it goes as smoothly as you'd expect from a NetObjects product.
The Administrator is designed to be installed on either the same machine as the Authoring Server, or on an NT client with domain admin rights. The Administrator does exactly as the name implies - it administers rights to the server. It is also used to create and delete sites, add/modify/delete user profiles, establish privileges to sites, assign users to sites, set security protocols, and back up sites. The Administrator is cake to work with, especially if you've used other point-and-click GUI-based admin tools in the past. It's a lot like NT's user admin tool, but far, far superior in its granularity and levels of control. It's really what most domain admin tools should model themselves after. While very granular, it's still friendly and intuitive, an obvious plus in my book. If you'd like to save yourself some time in creating accounts, you can import your existing NT accounts from your server to get things going.
The Contributor Client is, for lack of a better description, really cool. It allows anyone with the appropriate privileges to submit basic text-formatted data to the server, and have it output as HTML. The client is a Java applet that simply downloads to the user's workstation displaying a page created in TeamFusion for data input. Once the data is input into the page, it is processed by the server, and churned out as cleanly formatted HTML. No muss, no fuss. This requires the building of template pages on the server, which is quickly handled via the TeamFusion client's autotemplate generator. If your collaborators are mostly submitting items such as articles, reviews, job openings, etc. then the Contributor Client will be quite useful to you. With the Contributor Client, you may also update online databases by attaching the template to an ODBC data source.
Now for the big daddy, the TeamFusion client software. TeamFusion is basically an enhanced version of NetObjects' trademark Fusion product, reviewed previously in the WDJ. TeamFusion takes all the ease and power of Fusion, and rolls into it security and access levels.
With TeamFusion, users who find the Contributor Client too simplistic can really get cranking on well-designed pages for your sites. This client allows everyone, including designers, developers, scripters and writers, to build quality pages that don't look like "point-and-click templates". Style and structure can be maintained through the use of sitestyles that are shared amongst contributors. Each user can check in/check out their changes, but final approval goes to those with site administration rights. Users can also examine who has checked in/out what components of a site and maintain bragging rights over their work.
Some finer points of the TeamFusion client also include:
- DHTML support
- Absolute positioning via cascading style sheets
- Nested tables
- Flat tables
One of the most notable features of TeamFusion, which I did not mention in my previous review of Fusion, is the support for complex behaviors. If you like tricky HTML (like the famous Wacky HTML) then you'll be glad for the behavior support. Building cool tricks is fast and clean with TeamFusion.
I'm a big fan of documentation. Actually, I border on fanatical about it (probably comes from having to write it in the past). Thankfully, NetObjects came through with plenty of online and written documentation. The TeamFusion Client is so well documented; it blows away other manuals that I've seen. I especially liked the section on the differences in browsers and handling browser issues, with an emphasis on helping the HTML novice understand the difference.
Summing it up, you've got to give NetObjects tons of credit for this product. While I am a little less than impressed that 99% of the product relies upon Windows 95/98/NT, it's still a rock-solid toolkit. If I had three wishes for the product they would be:
- A Java client for the administration module.
- A Unix/Linux/BSD-compatible version of TeamFusion. Not all of us develop strictly on NT, and it's sad to see such a powerful and useful product limited to one platform.
- An easy way to upgrade NetObjects Fusion to the TeamFusion client, or a way to install TeamFusion and have a quick way to make it "non-collaborative" so I could work on personal sites with it.
Other than that, this is an outstanding toolkit for anyone looking to build a collaborative Web site with minimal time and effort. If you've got staff clamoring to contribute to your site, and you want to ensure that it gets done in the best possible way, you can't go wrong with this product. Unless you're one of the HTML snobs who harbor a deep dislike for anything that's not raw HTML, you'll love this Authoring Suite.
NetObjects Authoring Suite 3.0
NetObjects, Inc.
http://www.netobjects.com
Requirements:
- Authoring Server: Pentium 200+, NT Server or Workstation 4.0/Service Pack 3, 64 MB RAM, 200MB disk space
- Authoring Server Administrator: Pentium 133+, 32 MB RAM, Win95/98/NT
- TeamFusion Client: Pentium 133+, Win95/98/NT, 32 MB RAM, 100 MB disk space
- Content Contributor Client: Java 3.x-compliant Web browser
Pricing: $1,585 (includes licenses for 2 concurrent connections)
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