Role call

The key to understanding NetObjects TeamFusion is appreciating its client/server architecture. TeamFusion stores information about each web site under its control in a database created and administered through the centrally located NetObjects Authoring Server. Developers design, modify and publish sites from one or more workstations running the TeamFusion Client.

In addition, basic text and graphics can be added to web sites from any intranet node with a Java-capable browser, simply by pointing at the NetObjects Content Contributor applet on the Authoring Server.

The product impressed me as striking the right balance between flexibility and control for project resource management. Here's an overview of the roles users can play with respect to the system:

At the top of the web development hierarchy is a Team Leader, who assigns other team members and their respective priveleges using a server-side program called NetObjects Administrator.

Site designers can be added to or removed from projects on demand, receiving fine-grained access to site assets.

In recognition of the fact that large organizations have many more content providers than web developers (often by a factor of 10 or more), NetObjects provides for a class of Content Contributors. Users with this level of access can submit content through a Java applet, which presents a customized entry form with fields pre-defined by site developers.

Thin-client content contribution is an awesome concept, and better yet, it really works (more below). In practice, NetObjects gives us in v1.0 a vanilla implementation that accepts only text; no HTML or scripting contributions are allowed. But this is clearly where the product is headed -- all the moreso now that NetObjects has acquired the software line of Acadia Software, Inc., including scripting and bean-building tools (See Cacheworthy, 17.Feb.98 for details.)

Laying it down

The product ships in a suitably heavy box that contains two CD-ROMs, one for the Authoring Server and one for the Clients, plus distinct documentation for each. Since there are two Client licenses there are two sets of Client documentation, right down to the laminated Quick Reference cards -- a nice touch. There is also a simpler Reference card for Content Contributors.

Installing TeamFusion isn't hard, but a few needless surprises evidence its v1.0 status. The Authoring Server requires a local web server for previewing sites. The machine on which I was testing happened to be running Netscape FastTrack, which is a supported option, although the default, bundled with TeamFusion, is Lotus' Domino Go Server 4.6. (IBM Corp. made a majority investment in NetObjects last year.) What I didn't notice until after I'd installed everything and created numerous team members is that TeamFusion requires FastTrack 2.01 or later; I was running 2.0.

This would hardly have made it into print if the Authoring Server didn't have to be reinstalled from scratch to change web servers. Are 30-digit serial numbers really necessary? In any case, what we need here is a modular install.

I loaded the Server (as an NT service) onto a Pentium Pro 200 running Windows NT (sp3) in 96 MB RAM. TeamFusion isn't shy about asking for resources; the box pegs minimum memory at 64 MB. It ran well -- though not without discernable churn -- on my SCSI-driven test machine. Do NOT skimp on the server with this product.

TeamFusion Client I loaded onto two network PCs, one a 200 MHz Pentium running Windows NT 4.0, the other a 133 MHz notebook running Windows 95. The same 32 MB notebook was also my test client for the Content Contribution applet.

With all this software in place I frankly puzzled for a few minutes how best to evaluate it. The slim Authoring Server and Administrator Guide describes a couple of diagnostics, which I ran. Convinced that TeamFusion and the Go Webserver were behaving themselves, I resolved to follow the laminated 6-page Quick Start card.

Here's what I saw after launching NetObjects Administrator and adding several users:

Fig 1 - NetObjects Administrator (Enlarge)

Customizable templates bundled with TeamFusion

AutoSites (complete site protoypes)	Company_Intranet a 32-page employee intranet Company_Internet a 21-page corporate Web site
Pages	2-, 3-, and 4-column layouts FAQ Office Directory What's New
Forms	Billing_Form Feedback_Form Guestbook Order Form Product_Support Shipping_Form Subscriptions
Contributions (templates for Content Contributors)	Articles Employee_Directory Events_Calendar Job_Opportunites People_Section Press_Releases

In addition to these templates TeamFusion comes with sample web sites for two fictitious corporations ("Armor Insurance" and "Vox Publishing"). Again, the documentation should make more of these, as they are indispensable for gauging the product's capabilities.

Manny's long night

Once one or more team members have been assigned to a project the action moves to TeamFusion Client. NetObjects includes thorough documentation for the Client, and no wonder: it's a beefed up version of NetObjects Fusion 2.02, the company's mature, stand-alone site-building tool for Windows and the Macintosh.

TeamFusion Client's Getting Started manual has its heart in the right place, but wants another release or two to be truly effective. The problem isn't sloppiness so much as ambition. TeamFusion is really two major products in one. It's focus is client/server web project management, and a significant part of the learning curve concerns access control, check-in/check-out and other team-oriented features. For many web developers these will be radical, perhaps confining concepts. No organization contemplating a TeamFusion installation should underestimate the cultural impacts of structured collaboration.

At the same time, TeamFusion Client has all of Fusion's ability to churn out pixel-precision page layouts. Much of TeamFusion Client's feature set (detailed in a 17-chapter User Guide) concerns the design and management of site structures, navigation features, styles and graphics.

I decided to pursue the tutorials in the Getting Started manual. Enigmatically, the sample site used here ("MediaCell's Intranet Project") bears no relation to the sample webs mentioned above. The manual defines several fictional characters, each with a distinct project role and icon to flag relevant sections of the tutorial. For this review I chose to follow "Anya," a senior designer responsible for creating sites and site content. Unfortunately, she appeared on page iv ... and never again. Poor Anya.

The following paraphrase from the tutorial is emblematic of the experience many users will have learning TeamFusion (at least until NetObjects refines its materials):

Manny was eager to get started. Unaware of the missing practice site, he searched in vain for awhile, then settled down to a long evening learning all about the TeamFusion Client.

Test drive

Selecting the AutoSite or Template (*.nft) button I navigated to the Samples directory and chose Vox_Publishing. I then created a new site called "Vox4Review" based on this template. The resulting TeamFusion screen, shown below, graphically depicts the site structure.

Site View of Vox4Review (Enlarge)

• Page View - the drag & drop visual editor where you design web pages.
• Style View - a browser for NetObjects SiteStyles: sets of graphic elements that can be applied across entire web sites with a single click.
• Assets View - a listing of site Files, Links, Data Objects and Variables.
• Publish View - the screen you use to upload sites to a web server.

While all of these are important at some point in the project life cycle, you'll spend most of your time in Page View. The following screen shot shows how my sample site's Home Page looks in this view.

Page View of Vox home page (Enlarge)

Surely the most unique feature of TeamFusion is the way it enforces concurrency control. You can't do anything to a site until you click the Check Out button in a given context. For instance, to rearrange pages in the Site View, you must first check out the SiteStructure. Once you check out an asset, other members of your team must wait until you check it back in to work with it. TeamFusion makes it easy to tell which assets are checked out, and by whom.

Maverick web designers used to having free reign of a site will trip over this time and again. But TeamFusion is doing just what it's supposed to: managing concurrent work on a web site. I found the workgroup implementation lucid and wonderfully robust -- it never crashed, exciting news for a v1.0 product that eats 64 MB RAM for breakfast.

TeamFusion's graphic site design features are essentially those of NetObjects Fusion, which has been thoroughly (and positively) reviewed elsewhere. Here I will merely nod at the product's richness, which encompasses HTML 3.2 and allows text, graphics, sound files, Java, ActiveX, and Shockwave elements to be effortlessly dropped on a page. Forms can be created and hooked to CGI scripts. Support for Cascading Style Sheets and Dynamic HTML is absent, a more egregious omission since the release of Macromedia Dreamweaver (reviewed in IDM, 16.Mar.98). But I don't expect NetObjects to suffer long from the comparison.

Where TeamFusion and Fusion do suffer is in the area of code generation. NetObjects early on made the decision to deny developers control of source code in favor of precise, programmatically generated layouts. Thus with TeamFusion you get the ability to create, share and deploy SiteStyles, MasterBorders and SiteLayouts consistently across corporate web sites. What you lose is the ability to write even the simplest HTML.

Conceding that centralized administration is a very important product goal, I can think of two reasons you might on occassion need to "grow your own."

One is to achieve layout effects outside the Fusion universe. Yes, as gorgeous as Fusion sites can be, there is apparently a limit to their look-and-feel flexibility. For instance, I could find no way to achieve the simple color banding used in tables throughout this review. The HTML is a cinch: put BGCOLOR attributes in each row of the table and set the CELLSPACING above zero, like so:

<TABLE CELLSPACING="2">
<TR BGCOLOR="yellow">
   <TD>
      ; row content
   </TD>
</TR>
<TR BGCOLOR="yellow">
   <TD>
      ; row content
   </TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>

With TeamFusion every table I created had a consistent, auto-generated structure -- but not the foregoing structure, which I find rather cute.

The other imperative for greater flexibility is that TeamFusion currently butchers existing code on import. Frankly, as I began my review, the thought crossed my mind that this might be the product with which to automate production of Intranet Journal. Encouraged by the Import existing Web Site (*.html) option, I watched as TeamFusion downloaded idm.internet.com to a user-configurable depth of three levels. The unnavigable mess it made of our code gives me chills as I write this.

IDM's HTML is far from perfect, but it renders well in the major 3.x and 4.x browsers and for the most part passes muster with the HTML Validator utility in Allaire HomeSite 3.0 (which NetObjects pages generally do not). For TeamFusion to stumble so badly on reasonable HTML limits the product's market to new installations willing to discard legacy code. That's a shame.

Embracing the casual contributor

Complementing TeamFusion's workgroup features is one of the coolest uses of Java I've seen to date. Simply by pointing at the Authoring Server, users anywhere on a corporate web can access an applet that authenticates them, then returns a list of allowable content contribution forms. These forms are produced on the fly from assets called Data Objects embedded in TeamFusion web sites.

With these assets NetObjects is pioneering a revolution in web development. Similar to data-aware components of the type found in client/server RAD tools, TeamFusion Data Objects enable site designers to specify areas for update within web pages. Updates can come either from Content Contributors (via Java applet) or from external ODBC data sources. Note that this is not the same as making a web site "data-driven." TeamFusion sites must be periodically generated and uploaded, whereas sites with true database connectivity depict current data at all times. But for slow-changing assets such as the Employee Phone Book shown below (left), the ability to solicit content from non-technical users is its own reward.

Employee Directory with Data List (Enlarge)

Data List definition dialogue (Enlarge)

Adding Data Objects to your pages is simple. A Data List or other connectivity asset is defined simply by drawing it on the Page Layout with a tool. Double-clicking on this asset brings up a dialog like that shown above (right). Define your fields, sort order, and whether field contents are HTML links, and you're good to go.

When someone with Content Contributor priveleges logs into the TeamFusion Authoring Server, he or she loads a form displaying precisely the fields defined for the Data Object. Very cool. This feature I expect we will be using at Intranet Journal to solicit updates for our Event Calendar, press releases, and so on. The only weakness of the paradigm is its plain vanilla nature, mentioned above. Not to worry. NetObjects and investor IBM clearly have bigger things in mind for this strategic capability.

Pricing and Availability

TeamFusion is available through NetObjects' distributors, VARs, corporate resellers and mail order catalogs.

NetObjects Inc.
602 Galveston Drive
Redwood City, CA 94063
Ph: 1-888-449-6400 toll-free or (650) 482-3200
Fx: (650) 562-0288

NetObjects, NetObjects Fusion, TeamFusion, AutoSite, SiteStructure and SiteStyles are trademarks of NetObjects, Inc. All other brand or product names are property of their respective holders.