Macromedia Sitespring

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.