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It's December already, so we think we're safe in declaring Macromedia Contribute the intranet tool of the year.

That's saying something, because the last major release we looked at, CodeCharge Studio, literally shaves months off the development time for database-driven applications. But Contribute is far more useful for the average intranet. For only $100, it allows non-techie contributors to add fresh content to the company intranet, without ever knowing a lick of HTML.

Figure 1. Macromedia's Contribute has a number of help systems built-in, so you'll never need to hunt around for the manual. When you first start it up, Contribute offers to give you a quick tour or guide you through a tutorial.

By "contributors" we mean all the various department reps who need to add fresh material to your intranet to keep it up to date, whether it's Human Resources reps who need to add new policies, or engineers who need to add new technical specs. If you have an extranet, you might have a few people whose job it is to add current product prices for outside dealers.

Updating information, before Contribute came around, could be handled in two different ways: either all the changes could be funneled through the staff Webmaster, leaving him or her little time to improve the site or work on anything else; or the various department contributors could be given copies of Dreamweaver or FrontPage, then tutored on the do's and don'ts of site creation. The second system leaves the Webmaster more free time, but could also lead to emergencies, like when contributors tinker with tags they shouldn't and bring down a whole page.

The idea behind Contribute is to make editing a Web page as simple as editing a word processing document. Non-technical contributors can change the text on a page, but can be prohibited from changing anything else, including the formatting. It's an idea so blissfully simple and so necessary, we don't know why someone didn't release a product like it years ago. Thank goodness Macromedia finally did. For a first version, it's an amazingly polished, easy-to-use product. It's a 1.0, but it feels like a 3.0.

Figure 2. Contribute has an Internet Explorer browser built in, so you can surf the Internet or your intranet and find the page you want to edit.

Starting Out
Contribute is designed for pre-existing sites, so don't mistake it for a site-building tool. It's also not a high-level content management system, like Vignette. While it could work on intranets of any size, it's meant for those with departmental contributors who need to make simple page changes, such as altering text, adding or changing images and adding new pages.

To start Contribute, load it on your machine and the machines of the various contributors. The program is a snap to install because it runs like a standard desktop application. There's nothing to set up on a server. Use the controls to make yourself a site administrator, then e-mail connection keys to the various contributors to your site. When the users open the connection keys, their version of Contribute will set-up automatically. Contribute can reach pages by FTP or across LANs, and works with existing firewalls and security systems.

As an administrator, you can define what users can do to the pages. If you're a control freak, or if your users are technically inept, you'll want to lock them out of anything but text editing. You can also let them add images (of determined sizes) or create new pages. Those new pages will automatically have your template's look.

Figure 3. When you select a page to edit, this editing toolbar appears at the top of the screen. It looks like the toolbar from Microsoft Word or other word processing applications, so it won't seem foreign and off-putting to nontechnical users.

The Contributor's View
We have to think that the various department contributors will love Contribute even more than the Webmasters. The ones that we've talked to in the past—people with no HTML experience who were given a copy of some insanely complicated application, ushered into a few auditorium—-sized classes on Web building basics, and then expected to (yikes!) update the intranet-have usually dreaded working with the site. The possibility of forgetting the few things they've learned is all too real, and the chance of breaking a page and bringing down the site fills them with dread. They'll find it much easier to simply edit the sections that need to be changed, without having to worry about tags, fonts or formats.

At the moment, Contribute is only available for users of Windows NT, 98 SE, ME, 2000, and XP, which surprised us, since Macromedia is one opf the few companies that usually releases Mac versions at the same time. The company has announced that the Mac version will be out early in 2003, so those who "think different" shouldn't have too long to wait.

Users launch Contribute like any other application, then use it to browse to the page they want to edit. A version of Internet Explorer is built into Contribute, so it performs like a standard browser. When they have the page, they click the Edit Page button in the top left corner to check the page out. If the page is already checked out by another user, a message saying so appears above the page. When adding content, users can cut and paste material, or simply drag entire Word or Excel documents from their desktops into the Contribute interface. Contribute will handle the formatting by itself.