Looking for opinions, experiences

[Screenweasel]

Hello.

I'm evaluating Contribute for my company's needs, and while I've gone through
all the marketing collateral, I wanted to get some feedback from the users in
the field, as it were. What do you love about Contribute? What do you think can
be improved? Does it really save you time, taking out extraneous steps in the
wed editing area, or is it simply replacing a single step?

Is the Drafting mode like a WYSIWIG? How much control over the HTML does
Contribute allow?

Really just want to know what the reality of the experiences are from the
people using it.

Thanks!

-screen

[wickahead]

Mr or Mrs. Weasel (or shall I call you Screen?) <sorry, too much coffee this
morning>,

Yes, the drafting mode is (mostly) WYSIWYG, but Contribute 3 (C3) has some
(limited) trouble renedering CSS, so YMMV. I run our corporate intranet (with
~30 departmental users), and giving people a (non-technical) solution to edit
pages is well worth the hassle. If you want the users to do anything complex
within C3, forget it. Basic text, images, hyperlinks are easy enough to do
within Contribute.

Contribute gives me enough control over what users are doing to be more of a
net benefit than a hassle. At our company, independent thinking is highly
encouraged, which is good, but it is bad for my goal of a uniform intranet web
experience.

As far as control over the HTML, I have not found a way for the users to see
HTML code (I don't think they can). If you need users to modify actual HTML
code, then DW is the way to go. C3 uses CSS that you set up, and you can hide
the styles that you don't want visible (by prefixing "mmhide" to your CSS
elements) - I wish DW had the same when creating pages from templates.

I think that C3 is good (and worth implementing), but C4 or C5 will be the
true product to watch (and implement with DW).

Hope this helps.

Mark