Netobjects Teamfusion™ Centralized Control and Distributed Content Management for Business Web Sites

NetObjects TeamFusion™ Centralized Control and Distributed Content Management for Business Web Sites

A White Paper January 1998

NetObjects, Inc. 602 Galveston Drive Redwood City, CA 94063 U.S.A. Table of Contents

The Evolution of Intranet Web Site Development 1

Web Site Development Options 3

NetObjects TeamFusion Overview 4

NetObjects Authoring Server 7

NetObjects Administrator 8

NetObjects TeamFusion Client 10

NetObjects Content Contributor 12

Conclusion 13

iii The Evolution of Intranet Web Site Development

Web sites are becoming the backbones of corporate information infrastructures.The grassroots efforts of a few individuals on internal Web sites have blossomed into a strategic shift in the way companies manage and share information. Supplementing—and in some cases replacing— electronic mail, voice mail, and file servers, intranet Web sites help meet increasing demands for timely information within and across departments. Companies are finding their intranet initiatives well worth the resources they require, with employees now able to get vital sales, marketing, benefits, and other information quickly and easily.

However, managing this infrastructure and maximizing returns over time has become increasingly difﬁcult. As intranets become more sophisticated, designing, building, and maintaining large intranet Web sites requires the pooled talents of more and more people.The ability of the site to provide timely, accurate, easy-to-ﬁnd information hinges on the ability of a project manager (sometimes called site producer) to coordinate the efforts of all the people working on the site, a team that can easily include programmers, designers, scripters, graphic artists, writers, editors, and administrators. Such participants vary widely in their technical expertise, design ability, and level of responsibility for various Web sites.Without integrated management of their efforts, a company’s intranet development and maintenance costs can skyrocket out of control—and the Web sites themselves can lose their value.

Resource Constraints Because most existing site development products can be difﬁcult to use, the actual creation of Web pages is usually handled by specially trained people. In this case, even such a straightforward task as adding a new press release to the public relations Web pages must be deferred to the designated Web development team.

Obviously, this process creates a bottleneck to getting information posted quickly, which in turn can lead to sites containing outdated—an even incorrect—information. Under such circumstances, employees may abandon internal Web sites, reverting to the more accurate and timely (or at least more familiar) information sources, such as e-mail, thereby wasting the resources spent on developing intranet sites.

Process Control Problems Corporate Web teams are bombarded by a growing number of content contributors who care about getting timely information on-line; one frequently heard estimate is that for every Web team member, there may be 10 people supplying content.

To ease the bottleneck problem of everything going through the core Web team, some companies allow representatives from different departments to create and post their own Web pages, using off-the-shelf page-design programs with templates provided by the Web team. However, this approach brings its own difficulties. Contributors inevitably introduce inconsistencies that weaken the impact of the site, make it more difficult for visitors to navigate around it, and cause information to be presented in a confusing manner.This situation is compounded in companies where departmental intranet Web sites have sprung up with little or no centralized planning. 1 When many different people are directly involved in creating a Web site, the following problems are common: • File and document management becomes a nightmare as dozens, hundreds, or thousands of files need to be tracked and managed on an ongoing basis. • There is no formal process for taking control of a file to modify it.Team members can’t be sure who is working on a file or whether they’re accidentally overwriting changes somebody else made. • The people who want to contribute content to the Web site can’t be sure the Web team actually received the documents they submitted. • Mistakes are inevitable and easy to overlook when there is no clear process for moving content from initial contribution through formatting, checking, and publishing.

The Needed Solution What corporations need is an integrated solution that enables different people to handle different Web site development tasks while it protects the overall structure and consistency of the site. Speciﬁcally, such a solution must: • Allow site producers to easily manage the entire site building process, including granting different levels of responsibility to different members of the extended Web team • Protect the integrity and security of the site • Let core Web team members design, create, and maintain multiple Web sites with greater visual consistency, control, and efﬁciency • Enable content contributors to easily and independently manage and submit information, thus reducing bottlenecks, mistakes, and outdated information.

I strongly believe in the model NetObjects TeamFusion is the ﬁrst site development solution that offers an integrated process for of letting people focus on what quickly and easily updating information from a variety of individual sources. NetObjects they do best.I’d like writers to TeamFusion addresses the fact that there are multiple people involved in each site—people with varying degrees of expertise in Web authoring, design, and so on. Its easy-to-use visual approach write,designers to design, provides comprehensive control over the process of designing, contributing to, and publishing content architects to build the Web sites. structure of the Web site. TeamFusion’s different modules NetObjects TeamFusion improves information delivery by: allow specialists to focus on • Distributing the Web site updating workload their area of expertise. • Coordinating development • Reducing mistakes and duplicated effort David Cadoff Managing Associate, • Allowing team members to publish information more efﬁciently and with greater Solutions for Technology independence and control than ever before. Coopers & Lybrand In short, NetObjects TeamFusion helps companies publish high-quality, cohesive Web sites faster and at a lower cost. It’s perfect for departmental intranets, small and medium businesses, and other group environments.

2 Web Site Development Options

As described above, multidisciplinary Web development teams face a number of daunting challenges.What are their software options today for meeting those challenges?

Current solutions can be categorized into two groups: • Page-oriented, ﬁle-based Web authoring tools that let page builders create and edit HTML pages, either directly in text or through a graphical interface • Complex database-centered systems (usually SQL) that manage the entire Web site creation and management process.

Low-End, Page-Oriented Products Standalone Web page design products (such as Microsoft FrontPage) are hampered by the limited control they offer over extended teams of Web developers and contributors, and the level of expertise they require even when some team-based development is supported.

For example, while some products support simple file sharing,* others require team members to attach updated files to e-mail messages in order to forward them for further action. Even when these file-based products have rudimentary task-management features, they still suffer from the limitation that authors need to keep track of directories and literal files in order to work on a site.

Most low-end products are also page-oriented, not site-oriented; they don’t provide the high-level view needed to effectively design and maintain the logical structure of a Web site.Thus there is often no way to ensure the overall look and feel of different pages within a site or different sites within an intranet.

In short, these products do little, (if anything) to facilitate the processes required for true team-based development.

High-End Database Systems Complex database publishing and source control systems are sometimes deployed to address the team Web site development problem. However, such products require a signiﬁcant degree of technical skill and training, limiting how widely they can be used throughout an enterprise.

Even when the necessary technical expertise is available, database systems often require custom installations that are expensive to develop and can become more expensive to maintain over time. Few companies can justify such spending for their intranet Web sites.

*Simple file-sharing is a gross-level control architecture. It merely prevents two people from working on the same file at the same time (i.e. a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet on a typical file server). It does nothing to protect the continuity of the site’s look and feel, or consistency of the content.

3 Their complexity also tends to make them inflexible in setup, configuration, and reconfiguration— just the opposite of what enterprises need to keep up with the dynamic nature of the World Wide Web. High-end database systems usually require that content conform to a rigid structure, with deviations from that structure being difficult—if not impossible—to accommodate.The result is a standardized layout that permits little customization to fit the needs of different departments. TeamFusion lets us share Rather than the Web site design meeting the needs of the information it displays, the information must be modified to meet the needs of the infrastructure. the work.It freed us from a manual,tedious,and error- The Third Alternative: NetObjects TeamFusion prone system of uploading and NetObjects TeamFusion is specifically designed for Web sites that are built, managed, and updated downloading files from servers. by an extended Web team of many different people. It combines the flexibility of dedicated Web We also like its easy-to-use authoring tools with the integration and process-control capabilities of high-end database sys- interface,with easy check- tems. NetObjects TeamFusion can thus provide cost-effective deployment with a reduced learning curve and support needs, resulting in an increasing return on investment. out/check-in and rollback functionality. NetObjects TeamFusion Overview Mark and Christina Leslie Wildfire WebWorks NetObjects TeamFusion is the first Web authoring solution that brings an integrated roles-based approach to the biggest challenge facing Web teams today:centralizing control over the design and development of the Web site while distributing content management to contributors throughout an organization.By providing a means to streamline the production process, NetObjects TeamFusion can dramatically reduce the time and money needed to produce Web sites.

Imagine, for example, a corporate intranet with Web sites for several different departments. Using NetObjects TeamFusion, the IS department would have overall responsibility for the intranet’s infrastructure and departmental sites. A core Web team within (or reporting to) IS would set a consistent look and feel for the internal sites, and be responsible for publishing new and revised pages. Other people throughout the company, however, would be able to create and update speciﬁc parts of the site.

Corporate Authoring Servers Network

NetObjects PR Site TeamFusion Client HR Site

Authoring Server 1

NetObjects Network TeamFusion Client Operations Intranet Site

Finance Intranet Site

Authoring Server 2 NetObjects TeamFusion Client Marketing Intranet Site

Authoring Server 3

NetObjects Content Contributor 4 In such a scenario, the public relations department could keep employees and field sales person- nel throughout the company apprised of the latest media releases and events.The human resources department could post job openings, company policies, holiday schedules and events, and up-to-date benefits information—even allowing individual employees to access a secure database for details on their own specific benefits packages.The operations group could provide facilities maps, moving schedules, and requisition forms.The finance department could post bud- gets and monthly (or weekly, or daily) reports. And the marketing department could keep every- one current on important marketing programs and schedules.

With NetObjects TeamFusion, the people who create information can quickly and efﬁciently get it to all the other people who need it, with only minimal assistance from the core Web team.

NetObjects TeamFusion Architecture NetObjects TeamFusion has four integrated components: • NetObjects Authoring Server stores site, asset, and team information in a secure, backed-up central repository.The NetObjects Authoring Server can host many sites under development and can publish to any Web server. TeamFusion’s main benefit is • NetObjects Administrator lets site producers create sites and teams and assign editing and putting all the site’s assets and publishing privileges.The administration module lets site producers easily configure the roles management into one central and responsibilities preferred by each organization, rather than imposing a predetermined location.Now you can breathe workflow process. • NetObjects TeamFusion Client enables the core Web team to collectively design, build, a sigh of relief knowing that all and update Web sites. It builds on the visual, site-oriented Web development capabilities of your design team members can award-winning NetObjects Fusion™ 2.0 to minimize the complexity of dealing with dozens find what they are looking for! and hundreds of individual files as your site grows. It also provides an intuitive, team-oriented interface to NetObjects Authoring Server. Keith Harvey Technical Specialist • NetObjects Content Contributor applet lets authorized users add, modify, and delete Omni Healthcare,Inc. content on assigned pages of the site via a standard Web browser. It puts the management of content into the hands of the contributors—without compromising the visual integrity, quality, and usability of the overall Web site.

The entire NetObjects TeamFusion solution is based on open standards and allows sites to be published to any Web server. (Lotus Go Webserver software is included with the product.) NetObjects Authoring Server and NetObjects Administrator run on Microsoft Windows NT 4.0; NetObjects TeamFusion Client runs on Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT. NetObjects Content Contributor works with any Java-enabled browser on computers using the UNIX, Mac OS, or Microsoft Windows operating system.The entire NetObjects TeamFusion system runs on any TCP/IP network.

5 The NetObjects Family: NetObjects Fusion and NetObjects TeamFusion

NetObjects TeamFusion extends the functionality of NetObjects Fusion to a company-wide Web team. At the heart of the suite, NetObjects TeamFusion Client software builds on three key benefits of NetObjects Fusion that have won kudos from Web developers: • Site orientation. NetObjects Fusion was the first software to recognize that a site is more than a linked collection of pages and elements. It gives Web builders a whole-site perspective, with an easy-to-use visual hierarchy that can be modified in moments. NetObjects Fusion uses this site information structure to automatically create and manage a site’s navigation buttons and links. • Centralized control over style and visual consistency. NetObjects Fusion was the first product to offer several ways to achieve consistent visual consistency.The MasterBorders feature lets designers place elements that repeat on every page in the site.The SiteStyles™ Manager lets designers apply a visual theme throughout a site. • Integrated asset management and publishing. NetObjects Fusion provides a central location to view, verify, and manage all assets and links used in authoring the site. It also has a one-button publish function that converts the entire site into HTML pages and uploads them to any Web server.

NetObjects Fusion is designed for one or two people to build a Web site. If the Web team later expands, sites created in NetObjects Fusion can be brought into NetObjects TeamFusion (although v1.0 of NetObjects TeamFusion Client does not import NFX components or external data objects from the NetObjects Fusion ﬁle).

The NetObjects TeamFusion suite also adds: • Secure access control (see NetObjects Administrator section) • Role management (see NetObjects Administrator section) • Check-in/check-out (see NetObjects TeamFusion Client section) • Automated content contribution (see NetObjects Content Contributor section)

6 NetObjects Authoring Server

Acting as a centralized server for NetObjects TeamFusion, NetObjects Authoring Server allows users of NetObjects TeamFusion Client and browser-based clients on different platforms to collaborate in the process of building and maintaining Web sites. Built on a scalable client/server architecture, NetObjects Authoring Server manages user activities and resources to ensure overall application reliability, integrity, and performance.

Client Tier Server Tier

WWW Server

Web Server Web Browser Extension Connector

Stage/Publish Area

Authoring Server

Sessions Manager Preview Engine Stage/Publish Engine

NetObjects Database Engine Site TeamFusion Client Database

The Authoring Server is comprised of the following integrated elements: • At the heart of the server is a powerful SQL relational database management system. Every Web site created with NetObjects TeamFusion constitutes a repository that is managed by this system.The RDBMS provides automatic rollback and recovery in case of data corruption due to a system failure. • The Sessions Manager handles all interactions between NetObjects Authoring Server and NetObjects TeamFusion Clients. Built on a multithreaded scalable processing architecture, the Sessions Manager optimizes performance by load balancing database resources and connections among different sessions. • As its name implies, the Preview Engine is invoked whenever anyone developing or modifying a Web page wants to see what the ﬁnished page will look like.The Preview Engine generates the appropriate HTML code and displays the page in the user’s preferred browser (even launching the browser automatically if it is not already running). • When someone using NetObjects TeamFusion Client indicates that a site is ready to be published, NetObjects Stage/Publish Engine starts a background task on NetObjects Authoring Server that reloads every page layout and generates the HTML code for the entire site. Once generated, the HTML pages and their associated assets can be placed in the internal NetObjects Authoring Server staging area for ﬁnal testing, or uploaded (published) via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to the live Web server.

7 • The open architecture of NetObjects TeamFusion enables it to work with any Web server that has FTP capability.The product ships with Lotus Go Webserver, but it can just as easily be integrated with your existing Netscape, Microsoft, or other Web server solution.

• The WebServer Extension Connector handles communications between NetObjects Authoring Server and browser-based NetObjects TeamFusion clients.This software is simply a small CGI executable ﬁle that acts as a “pipeline”between browsers and the various engines running inside NetObjects Authoring Server. Because all the server processes are already running when dynamic browser requests are made, browser information can be processed without the overhead of starting additional processes, thus providing optimal performance.

User Authentication Because NetObjects TeamFusion is designed to integrate smoothly with existing network infrastructures, NetObjects Authoring Server can use either of two types of authentication: the administrative database within NetObjects Administrator, or Microsoft Windows NT authentication.

The administrative database contains only those users whose profiles were created by a TeamFusion administrator or imported from other NetObjects Authoring Servers or from a Windows NT domain, server, or workstation. By contrast, the Windows NT authentication method uses the same user names and passwords that are already defined for a local machine, a local domain, or a specified remote domain.

Using Windows NT authentication allows users to change their passwords at will; their NetObjects TeamFusion password will always be the same as their Windows NT password. NetObjects Administrator only permits authorized administrators to change user passwords.

Even when NetObjects Administrator’s own authentication is used, user names (but not passwords) can be imported from a Windows NT domain, a Windows NT Server or Workstation in a Windows NT domain, or a local system.

NetObjects Administrator

NetObjects Administrator software lets site producers maintain ultimate control over their company’s Web sites while relieving them of the burden of many routine tasks.

The primary purposes of NetObjects Administrator are site and user role management and secure access control.The software lets site producers match each member’s privileges with his or her skills and responsibilities. A person assigned to multiple site teams can have different privileges for each site.

8 A given individual can have permission to change a site’s structure, page layouts, MasterBorders, graphic styles, and/or site assets (such as text and graphic ﬁles). For example, a site producer would have authority to change the underlying structure of the site, such as adding another level directly under the home page. A graphic designer might not be allowed to make structural changes, but would have full freedom with MasterBorders and other page-design elements. A marketing manager might have full privileges for adding and modifying content within her marketing Web site, but only limited content-contribution privileges on the public relations site. Some people (usually only one per team) must also be given authority to publish sites.

For faster assignment of privileges, site producers can choose one of three basic roles for each authorized user: administrator (full privileges for creating and managing user accounts), site creator (full design and content privileges, but no administrative authority), or contributor (content updating privileges only).

Privileges can be modiﬁed and users added or deleted whenever needed through the easy-to-use NetObjects Administrator screen. Using this same interface, administrators can even see who has which pages checked out at any given time.

Administrators can back up a NetObjects TeamFusion site with a single click.Restoring a site from the backup copy is just as simple. Both functions can also be used to move existing sites and NetObjects Authoring Servers to new locations as an intranet Web system grows.

9 NetObjects TeamFusion Client

NetObjects TeamFusion Client leverages the award-winning design of NetObjects Fusion software. Both products feature a visual “whole site”approach, with easy drag-and-drop organization of entire Web sites and automatic creation and updating of internal links.

Site design The SiteStructure™ Editor lets designers create or modify a Web site’s structure quickly with a single, easy-to-use visual tool. New pages can be added with the click of a button, and existing pages rearranged with drag-and-drop simplicity. Navigation elements and links are created automatically—and updated whenever the hierarchy is changed.

Sites can be developed quickly by starting with one of the 21 professionally-designed templates included with the software, or by importing HTML pages or even entire existing sites.

Page design At the page level, NetObjects TeamFusion Client offers PageDraw,™ a graphical page layout editor. Similar to desktop publishing applications, PageDraw brings pixel-level precision to Web pages through WYSIWYG drag-and-drop layout. Using PageDraw, page designers can easily include text, graphics, image maps, Java applets, sound, QuickTime and AVI movies, Shockwave animations, and other leading Web technologies.

The MasterBorders and SiteStyles Manager features of NetObjects TeamFusion Client help create a consistent look and feel throughout a site.This consistency both promotes site identity and facilitates user navigation.

10 With MasterBorders, site designers can deﬁne top, bottom, and/or side borders containing standard elements such as banners, buttons, and company logos. Borders can be converted to HTML frames with a single click.These borders can be applied to groups of pages, allowing global changes. Multiple MasterBorders can be created.

The SiteStyles Manager implements a consistent graphic style and color scheme across a site. Elements controlled by the manager include navigational buttons, banners, and bullets, among others. More than 25 predesigned styles are provided with the client; these can be customized, or completely new styles can be deﬁned from scratch.

Check-in/check out NetObjects TeamFusion Client works with the NetObjects Authoring Server to provide ﬂexible yet secure control over Web site assets. All ﬁles are stored on the central server, providing a secure means for backup, version control, and pre-publication review.

Authorized users who need to modify an element of the site go through a simple check-out pro- cedure, which ensures that only one person can work on that element at a time. For example, a user with appropriate privileges can be working on the MasterBorders for a certain site while another team member is updating a SiteStyle affecting the same pages—both without fear of interfering with each other’s work. Unlike complicated, difﬁcult-to-use version control systems that are sometimes employed by Web developers, NetObjects TeamFusion has simple, intuitive visual cues to indicate which site elements each member is allowed to modify.

Because the site resides on a central server, checked-out pages or elements remain “ofﬁcially” unchanged until they are checked back in, and the changes are not actually made to the live Web site until an authorized team member publishes them.

Asset management NetObjects TeamFusion Client users with the proper privileges can globally add, edit, delete, and replace assets such as image ﬁles and links.The Assets Manager provides centralized control over such elements. It can automatically delete unused assets when a site is updated, and republish only those pages on which assets have been altered. If a link or asset is changed (such as updating a graphic), the Assets Manager will replicate the change everywhere it affects the entire Web site.

Site publishing NetObjects TeamFusion Client offers single-button Web publishing using a built-in FTP client. Simply clicking on the Publish button invokes the Publish Engine in NetObjects Authoring Server to generate the HTML code for all pages and upload them to the Web server.The Stage button permits authors to save their ﬁnished pages on a staging site for testing before they’re published to the live Web server.

When required, developers can add any additional HTML or other Web-page code they need— including scripts—before uploading the ﬁles. An open scripting interface enables developers to create dynamic data pages using middleware data-publishing tools.

11 NetObjects Content Contributor

According to published research,Web teams can spend up to 50 percent of their time handling routine text updates from content contributors.These content contributors—who typically have no desire to learn Web authoring skills but need to publish information in a timely manner—may With 30 to 40 content providers outnumber core Web team members by as much as 10 to 1. greatly outnumbering the 4 or With NetObjects Content Contributor software,Web teams can give contributors control over their 5 content “finishers”on our own content without jeopardizing the structure or visual design of the site. NetObjects Content team,we found that converting Contributor is an applet that runs in any Java enabled Web browser—which means that any files into HTML and organizing authorized person using almost any computer platform can keep their portion of the Web site up and tracking information was a to date. major bottleneck.NetObjects TeamFusion’s browser-based Once a user has logged in with a proper user name and password, NetObjects Content Contributor displays the sections of the site that are available to that user. After a specific section is Content Contributor module selected, the applet brings up a form with fields in which the user can add, modify, and delete text. allows users to contribute con- This corresponds to a Web page template that includes all of the layout and formatting designed tent from anywhere directly in by the Web team. Users can even paste in copy from their favorite word processing applications. HTML format.As the features of this module get richer,we see it When the page is done, the user can preview it, then notify the appropriate Web site producer greatly increasing the efficiency that the page is available for publication. Producers need only approve the new or changed of the overall process. pages and then upload them to the Web server; with NetObjects TeamFusion, they are freed of the time-consuming task of actually creating or updating pages. Ted Field Telecom Analyst Cellular One

12 Conclusion

With NetObjects TeamFusion, visual, team-oriented Web site building has ﬁnally become a reality.

• Site administrators can quickly set up accounts and privileges for all members of the extended Web team. • Site creators can view the structure of the site in an easy-to-understand graphical representa- tions and quickly build or modify its organization. • Graphic designers can instantly create or change the look and feel of an entire site or speciﬁc subsections. • Web developers can develop templates for content contribution and immediately make them available to anyone who needs them. • Content contributors can update a Web page whenever information on it changes.

In short, NetObjects TeamFusion gives all Web team members the tools and access they need to create and update information quickly and cost effectively.The result is streamlined site development and maintenance that keeps intranet Web sites working as vital information resources for the entire enterprise.