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Macromedia's Contribute is a popular, user-friendly Web editor that lets anyone supply Web content as easy as creating an Office document. It's popular with collaborative online projects like intranets.

Collage is a database-driven content management system, which was originally developed by Merant. Almost a year ago, Merant was bought by Serena, which had a history developing change management software.

Now Serena is integrating Collage with Contribute in an effort to put an easy-to-use front end on the powerful back end. It's an interesting experiment, and one that points out a change in the way organizations are managing their content, according to Nathan Rawlins, senior product marketing manager at Serena.

Two or three years ago, Rawlins said, the content management problem was focused on delivering content. Personalization and dynamic page generation were all the rage. Now, organizations are struggling with managing all of their content as the amount of content continues to grow.

"Any organization with a reasonable-sized Web site can have problems updating content," Rawlins said.

Collage, for its part, is somewhat unique among content management applications in that it is aimed at existing Web sites. New customers can point Collage at an existing Web site, and Collage will track the relationships between the different pieces of content. It doesn't require new users to replace their existing Web delivery architecture, which can save both time and money.

The industries where Collage is seeing success include financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, education, and government.

Collage has a browser-based front end for users, which Serena will continue to develop and support. But the opportunity to integrate with Contribute opened up several opportunities, including the ability to take advantage of the best of both systems.

Some Contribute users want to add the functionality of a database to their content management scheme. Collage now allows them to continue using Contribute and add Collage as the back end.

Some organizations need a thick application, not a browser-based system, because they have a Mac environment. Browser-based applications also suffer when users are travelling without Internet access. With Contribute, users can make changes offline when they can't connect.

Collage customers can use either front end at this point, but they must purchase Contribute separately.

"People want to be be able to manage content within a database," Rawlins said. "We see the combination of Contribute and Collage as fantastic for our users."

Contribute's user-friendly design has been integrated with the database-driven back-end from Serena's Collage content management system.