Macromedia, Inc. today announced the Macromedia Web Publishing System, which provides everything an organization needs to affordably build and manage web and intranet sites. The Macromedia Web Publishing System (WPS) enables tens, hundreds, or thousands of content contributors to publish websites for internal and external communications. The WPS consists of the market-leading Macromedia Studio MX 2004, Macromedia Contribute 3, Macromedia FlashPaper 2, and new Contribute Publishing Services.

"Content management systems have historically been an expensive roll of the dice, with a lot of set-up costs and user complexity that limited their adoption," said Rob Burgess, chairman and CEO, Macromedia. "The WPS empowers anyone to publish without the pain and expense of traditional solutions. There isn't a better choice out there at any price."

Traditional content management systems primarily focus on the complex technical and back-end implementation of websites and intranets with little regard for content contributors or total cost of deployment projects that can extend for months. The WPS provides a flexible, affordable, scalable content management solution that empowers content providers while ensuring administrator safeguards to maintain site integrity. WPS deployments can be accomplished in days on existing websites without the need for extensive implementation projects and consulting services.

"Flexibility and ease of use are keys to success for today's content creation and management systems," said Andrew Warzecha, senior vice president and director, META Group, a leading provider of IT research, advisory services, and strategic consulting. "Solutions that extend existing infrastructure, embrace open standards, simplify workflows, and reduce the hoops that users have to jump through to share information at low price points are beginning to break a lot of market perceptions about this space."

The WPS is designed to address the three main constituencies of the web publishing process: business users, web professionals, and IT managers. Business users can publish web content using Contribute 3. Web professionals can design and build web sites and applications with the market-leading professional toolset in Studio MX 2004, which includes the award-winning Macromedia Dreamweaver web development software. The more than two million web professionals who currently use Dreamweaver can now use the WPS to collaborate effectively with the non-technical business professionals who contribute content to the sites they build and manage.

The new Contribute Publishing Services server component included with the WPS allows web and IT managers to centrally manage users, roles, and website editing permissions. This new lightweight application is easily installed in minutes on Windows, Linux, and Unix servers or it can be deployed to standard J2EE application environments. It enables administrators to centrally manage access to websites, integrate with enterprise systems via LDAP and Active Directory user directories, and track publishing activities across large numbers of websites and publishers.

"Macromedia Web Publishing System delivers the most important and necessary features found in large-scale content management systems at a fraction of the cost and complexity," said Michael Hazard, web technology group project director, University of Rochester Medical Center. "The out-of-the-box features are extremely useful, like notifications and hooking Contribute Publishing Services to our directory service and, because the solution is extensible, we also have ability to build custom solutions."

For more information, or to download a preview release, visit www.macromedia.com/go/wps.