Product Reviews

Macromedia Sitespring  [PC Pro]
COMPANY: Macromedia	PRICE: £1,519  Three users, (exc VAT)
RATING:	ISSUE: 87  DATE: Nov 01

As soon as you move away from developing Web sites for your own company, or start to have other people involved with the design or development of a Web site, you expose yourself to problems.

Often, the other people involved aren't in the same office as you - the client definitely won't be - and clients have the audacity to have different ideas to you. Somehow you need to manage these people and make sure they all know what needs to be done. You also need a way to allow all of them to suggest changes, discuss issues and for the project manager to assign tasks to individuals, so that one job doesn't get done by more than one person.

Along with all this, the client needs to be kept up to date with how the project is progressing. The client will also want to be involved in some of the discussions and to suggest changes. The ability to 'roll back' changes at any time and to create 'snapshots' of the site is useful as a project progresses.

Managing all this can become quite a headache. A lot of us do this by using a combination of phone calls, emails, public exchange folders, Post-It notes, scraps of paper, knots in handkerchiefs and any other methods of communicating and reminding that seem appropriate. Soon it becomes obvious that a better way needs to be found.

There are several commercial products out there, but most are aimed at large design houses and have a price tag to match. Sensing a hole in the marketplace, Macromedia has released Sitespring, which it claims will help out in this area. At a starting price of £1,519, it's also affordable by most Web design companies that take these issues seriously.

Where to start

Sitespring is installed on the same box as your development Web server, which must be running NTFS, otherwise Sitespring won't install. The initial setup, administration and the running of the program are all done via a Web interface. In fact, for all users, all the functionality of Sitespring is accessed via a Web browser, which makes it easy for team members and clients based at other locations to access the system.

To understand Sitespring, it's best to see how it may be used during the development of a Web site. First, the Administrator creates users, the maximum number being set by the licence you buy, which starts at three. These users are the team members, not clients or client users, who can look and participate in the project Web site but can't edit the Web pages - more of this distinction later.

When you create users, bear in mind the user name is case sensitive as well as the password - something that users of NT-based systems aren't used to. Apart from the usual form of details for a user, you also set their email address and whether they have project manager permissions or user permissions with or without permissions to publish to project sites.

If they have project manager permissions, they can do more or less anything on the system except overall Sitespring server configuration issues, which are left to the Administrator. Users, on the other hand, can only view the details for a project and add or modify any task on the system, or delete tasks that they've created. I personally would prefer a more granular security model, so that you can allow some users extra control - perhaps this may appear in future versions. All users can post to the discussion groups.

The next stage is to set up a client, which can be set up by a Project Manager. By clicking on the Clients button, a form appears where you can enter the client's details and, after a save, you can add client users. These are the people who can view the project Web site and have no impact on the number of licences your copy of Sitespring is registered for. The navigation of these pages has been well thought out, it's clear and unfussy with a universal look between screens, which makes it easy to learn.

Macromedia has tried to make it look and behave like an application and resisted the temptation to indulge in some sort of designer's fantasy. This is a good move and makes the system easy to become familiar with. The user interface that the

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clients see is called the Project Site and can be viewed by anyone on the project via a Web browser. This interface is built based on a template, several of which are supplied, although you'd obviously want to customise this to match your company's image.

The next step is to set up a project and assign a priority, owner, client and status to it. You can then add users to the team, while areas are automatically set up to display and manage Tasks and Discussions. Tasks are assigned to a user and given a status. The user is informed by email and they can then check the details via their browser. The user to whom a task is assigned can't delete the task but can alter its status to indicate what stage the job is at.

The discussion group works in a similar way, with the project team being informed by email of any posts made. This can lead to a lot of emails if the discussion is lively. One of the limitations of the discussion forum is that it's a single thread, so you can refer to the last comment posted but not to a previous one. This is a big disappointment compared to other Web-based discussion groups and, again, as this is the first version, perhaps we'll see some improvement here.

The final step in building a project is to set up the paths to the files that are associated with the project. These files have to exist on the Sitespring server within a shared folder. Sitespring has a full versioning engine so that previous versions of files are kept and can be rolled back at anytime. The clever thing here is that the files don't need to be opened via Sitespring or Dreamweaver for this versioning to work.

To test this claim, I opened a file stored on the Sitespring server on a workstation using Notepad. I made a small change and resaved it with the same name in the same location, thus overwriting the old file. When I checked in the project's Web page the file was showing with one modification, which I could 'roll back' if I wished by opening the previous version using the Web interface and resaving. So now you have protection against someone on the team making a change to a Web page and accidentally breaking it.

Client reassurance

The project site that Sitespring creates is a great mechanism for clients to be reassured that things are happening with the development of their Web site and also to give them a system to post messages and be involved in discussions. Better than this is the ability to assign tasks to client users. How many times has a client chased progress on a Web site when the hold-up has been that it's waiting for content or a decision from the client? By having a system such as this, hopefully everyone will know what's required of them and what others are doing to progress the project.

One major problem I came across was when I posted a Web page that needed approval to the project Web site. When users click on the link to approve this Web page, it opens in the browser. However, it had its images broken and the style sheets were missing. In my setup, I never managed to get this working properly, although, in demos I've seen, this was working fine. It must be something to do with the configuration of Sitespring and the Web server, but no amount of tweaking corrected the problem.

The speed at which the Sitespring pages were delivered also seemed to be a little slow, particularly the first time you access them. The server used was a 500MHz machine with 512Mb of RAM and twin IDE hard disks - hardly a top specification but still adequate for a Web server serving just three people.

On the whole, Sitespring is a great tool for managing Web projects. It's a little limited when compared to some of its bigger brothers like Interwoven's TeamSite (www.interwoven.com/ products/teamsite) or Merant's PVCS (www.merant.com/PVCS/index.html), but the difference in price is considerable. The lack of being able to comment to anything other than the latest posting in a discussion topic and the difficulty in getting the pathing right for Web sites so that their pages display correctly when published to the project site are disappointing limitations. That said, as this is a first version, perhaps these limitations and quirks will improve with later versions. In my view, they need to if the product is to be taken seriously by the Web development community.

That said, Sitespring is well equipped to do what it's designed to do and the level of structure and control that it gives to a project will ensure that it makes many friends. If you're designing Web sites for external clients and there's more than just you and the dog, then it's worth looking at a product such as Sitespring and, at this price, it seems like money well spent.

By Mark Newton