InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
January 12, 1998
Content By Committee
Development tools help business units collaborate o n Web development
Companies want solutions that support the development, deployment, and management of Internet and intranet applications in a way that is invisible to users. This request has meant lots of extra work for Web-development teams. According to some sources, the ratio of content contributors to Webmasters is 50 to 1, and most of a Webmaster's time is spent updating text. This can result in information bottlenecks and content errors.
Take Gulf Canada Resources Ltd. in Calgary, Alberta. The gas and oil company uses Cactus 3.0 to let employees post monthly production and cost estimates directly on the corporate intranet. "We've got an application that allows us to assemble all our corporate production and cost forecasts within our system," says Kevin Rasmussen, an application coordinator at Gulf.
Gulf employees from the accounting, corporate services, IT, legal, and
finance departments report updates monthly using Odin, the company's intranet-based budget and analysis system. Each department is also responsible for contributing and updating the content for its corresponding area on the intranet. Before Odin, Gulf departments had to manually assemble production and cost forecasts. "The budget cycle was a hellish time, because we had to add everything up from scratch," says Rasmussen. "Now, we're able to run scenarios in a matter of minutes."
Gulf runs Cactus 3.0 on an Information Builders EDA server, which supports Windows NT, Unix, and mainframe platforms. It also supports enhanced application performance with its inclusion of Java, VBScript, and JavaScript for Web capabilities. Available now, Cactus 3.0 is priced between $5,500 and $100,000, depending on the platform and number of clients.
Bell Atlantic Network Integration Inc. is also capitalizing on collaborative Web development. The company used TeamFusion 1.0 from NetObjects Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., t
o build its intranet site. TeamFusion is a Web application tool that uses a "roles-based" approach to help Web teams delegate development responsibilities throughout company departments.
"We were looking to improve internal communications, things like monthly newsletters, getting each department to publish their own content on the intranet," says Bill Devane, a Webmaster at Bell Atlantic Network Integration in Frazier, Pa.
Devane's Web team builds the content areas on the intranet. These areas get passed on to "content owners" in company departments who ensure the content, design, layout, and function of the site comply with their needs.
"Our feedback from Web developers was that once they developed sites, the [content contributors] were expanding," says David Chang, product marketing manager at NetObjects. Chang says the extra responsibilities assigned to Webmasters were becoming overwhelming.
TeamFusion uses a Java-based browser applet that lets designated contributors change Web content as
members of an expanded Web team encompassing both technical and nontechnical expertise. TeamFusion, which supports Windows NT and Windows 95, includes an authoring server with two TeamFusion clients, and a Content Contributor Java applet. Pricing begins at $995.
Accrue Software Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., is another vendor getting in on the collaborative action. Accrue Insight 1.1 is a network-based data-retrieval and analysis tool. It collects data directly from a network, eliminating the need for users to access log files to retrieve data. It monitors Web browsers such as Netscape Communicator 3.0 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 running on any platform. Accrue Insight sells for $15,000.
"We've developed an enterprisewide Web-development and tracking tool that lets users understand how well the content is performing, how well users are using the site, and what content works or doesn't work," says Vita Savagio, director of product marketing at Accrue. Accrue's customers include Sun Microsystem
s, Motorola, and the San Jose Mercury News.
Despite the growing popularity of collaborative Web design tools, some analysts caution that the market for these products has yet to mature. "These tools help to distribute the responsibilities, but they do not necessarily make life easier for the Webmaster," says Daryl Plummer, research director of Internet development at Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn.
Cautionary Word
Nonetheless, companies are upbeat about collaborative Web tools. One such company is Cellular One in San Francisco, which has been testing TeamFusion since October on its intranet with 30 content contributors. The intranet publishe
s daily news from company departments.
Ted Field, a telecom analyst in the IS voice services division at Cellular One, won't say whether the company will actually deploy TeamFusion, but he says he's optimistic about what it has to offer. "If we were to get into TeamFusion, we'd alleviate some of the work given to a Webmaster, who will then have more time to work with databases, search engines, and servers."
o keep up with their Web sites, companies are pushing development responsibilities outside the realm of developer teams, letting other departments contribute and manage Web content. To help, vendors have introduced Web-design products that let companies shape the context of how they use Internet and intranet applications.
Sharing The Load
As business departments take responsibility for providing content to company intranets, some of the weight is being lifted from programmers and developers, says Dave Cook, a director at Information Builders Inc. in New York, maker of Cactus 3.0, an enterprisewide Web-application-development tool. "For reuse and collaboration, we're seeing this more and more," Cook says.
Although content contribution can be delegated outside of Web teams, Plummer warns that those teams may still be blamed when things go wrong. "Let's say you have an accounting group that stages content," he says. When all of a sudden they can't access their content on the site, they'll go back to the central source and complain about it."
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