The Web Site Management System vs. Commercial Off-the-Shelf Products INTRODUCTION NPAC's Web Site Management System (WSMS) was designed to address particular needs of a large, complex web site which changes frequently and has many contributors, such as the CEWES MSRC web site. At the time the project was begun, we were aware of nothing in the commercial arena which meets the needs CEWES had articulated. Since then, a large number of commercial tools have become available which facilitate various aspects of the web site development, deployment, and management process. However as far as we are aware, the particular needs of a site like CEWES are still not terribly well served by commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions. At the request of the CEWES MSRC PET management, I will attempt to provide several comparisons which should illustrate how WSMS relates to the COTS market. We have selested two COTS products for the comparison. The first is Fusion from NetObjects. NPAC has selected Fusion for internal use in designing and producing our web site. It was chosen over competitors such as Microsoft's FrontPage because it was more stable (crashed less often) and was _somewhat_ better in dealing with a site the size of NPAC's. The second product is TeamSite from Interwoven. This is a very new product (first public release January 1998) for large-scale "enterprise web production" which is very sophisticated and seems to address some of the needs of a site like CEWES. DESCRIPTION OF WSMS WSMS was designed specifically for the needs of a site like CEWES, in order to facilitate the day-to-day maintenance and operation of a large web site. We felt from the start that issues of content were best left to COTS products. Key feature of WSMS include: 1) Ability to stage files from "prototype" to "production" to "archive" servers 2) File archiving also provides a basic version history capability 3) Security model to control ability to modify different "content groups" 4) Support for basic content review workflow 5) Use of file metadata to identify a) dead links b) orphaned files c) expired files d) search for files meeting certain metadata criteria, such as age, size, author, etc. 6) Built-in search engine functionality 7) Hooks to support webmaster-defined processing of files (i.e. running of scripts) DESCRIPTION OF NETOBJECTS FUSION NetObjects Fusion is one of the now numerous products supporting web site design. This type of product is primarily aimed at being able to easily produce a consistent look-and-feel across a web site. They are more sophisticated than a simple HTML editor, but like HTML editors, they are primarily focused on the _content_ of the site, not its operation and maintenance. Fusion claims to be able to act as a repository for an entire site and provide versioning capability for the site. However Fusion (and virtually all other such tools) use a highly visual GUI, which cannot effectively support a large web site. NPAC staff who have worked with Fusion say that it is adequate for designing _portions_ of a web site, but that if the site becomes too large, the visual paradigm rapidly becomes unusable. Likewise, Fusion can visually represent links between files, making is possible to try to _visually_ identify dead links and orphaned files -- which obviously will not scale to a large web site. The "Team Fusion" product, which extends Fusion to a multi-developer environment does include a security model. Fusion does not have its own search engine capabilities, though there are some advanced features which facilitate the production of site map pages and search pages. Fusion, and most such products, are limited to a Windows environment. DESCRIPTION OF INTERWOVEN TEAMSITE [Note: NPAC does not have this product. This description is based on discussions with Interwoven salespeople, examination of their literature, and participation in an online live demo. (See http://www.interwoven.com)] TeamSite is a very sophisticated product aimed at "enterprise web production", designed to support the development and deployment of mission-critical web sites ranging from 20,000 to 250,000 pages (and claims to be regularly stress-tested with > 500,000 file sites). It is first and foremost a highly sophisticated web-specific source code management system, with the ability to provide on-the-fly views of any mix of published and developmental content on a per-developer basis. It includes flexible workflow capabilities to accomodate review processes, etc. Content can be developed, checked in, reviewed, published, and any previous version of a file or site can be recovered. It provides a hierarchical model that seems appropriate for CEWES's needs. TeamSite supports quality assurance (testing) and maintenance (link checking, etc.) by being completely transparent to any tools the user may wish to apply for these operations -- it does not provide any kind of search engine, metadata search, automatic page expiration, etc. In addition to the web-based interface, TeamSite provides a full command-line interface and uses a standard unix (or NT) filesystem, so that users can script and use external tools however they wish. TeamSite is priced based on the number of seats of each class of user (master, administrator, editor, author), but articles I have read indicate base configurations start in the $30-40k range. CONCLUSIONS So far as I can tell, there are no COTS products that match the functionality of WSMS. Site design tools, like Microsoft FrontPage or NetObjects Fusion are more focused on content (intentionally NOT part of the WSMS design), but provide simple repository, versioning, and publication. However our experience indicates that they are not up to supporting a large site like the MSRC's. These tools tend to be fairly inexpensive and there is nothing to prevent them from being used for their content-development capabilities regardless of whether or not WSMS is installed. TeamSite is a very sophisticated product which, where is does overlap with WSMS, appears to have a significantly greater depth of capability. However TeamSite is clearly focused on development, and other tools (COTS or home-grown) would have to be found to support all of the link checking and metadata searches that WSMS supports. Conceptually, something like TeamSite could be quite useful to any organization with a "serious" web presence. TeamSite could in principle be coupled with WSMS (or a reduced functionality version that eliminates features redundant with TeamSite), however I would recommend seriously considering COTS products to provide the "missing" functionality, since the areas TeamSite does not handle are fairly small in scope and in most cases, there are numerous products available already. That said, I am of the opinion that TeamSite would be overkill for a site like the CEWES MSRC.