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The editing controls are similar to those of Microsoft Office documents, so there's no need to master an unfamiliar system. Options appear above the page view, letting users alter text, formatting, or images, or whatever combination the Web master has given them. When they're done, contributors simply click Publish to load the page. Any FTPing is handled by Contribute.

Users can also check out pages to work on when they're offline. That's a boon for remote workers who need to access the intranet, but don't want to maintain a phone connection while they work. And before they publish, users can click a button to send a link for a temporary page to coworkers or supervisors, so they can get approval first. Contribute deletes the temporary page when the real one it published.

Figure 5. The Administration panel in Contribute lets you set the permissions for your users and send connection keys to new users.

Safe and Secure
While the idea behind Contribute is a great one, it's the added extras that make it a standout product. For one, Contribute has a perfect defense against well-meaning but bumbling contributors: all pages can be rolled back to several different versions, so that even major mishaps can be quickly fixed. The rollback pane even shows who saved each version and when, so that you'll always know what you're getting.

As might be expected, Contribute works flawlessly with Macromedia Dreamweaver. Sure, Dreamweaver needs an update before it will work with Contribute, but the required update comes on the same CD. After that, users will be able to create connection keys from within Dreamweaver, and the two products will share a versioning system.

Perhaps more than any other company, Macromedia has come to mean innovation and quality for Web designers, and we're happy to see them knock the ball out of the park with this latest release. The features are well thought out, the interface is polished, and the price ($99 per license) is so low it seems like a misprint. If you have several department contributors adding to your intranet on a regular basis, give Contribute a try.

Figure 6. Another timesaving feature of Contribute is that a list of help topics is always available in the lower left corner of the screen. If you forget how to do something, simply select the task here for complete instructions.