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Description of Problem: The Director of Academic Information Technology for the University of Michigan Medical Center wanted to provide Medical School faculty, students and staff with a tool to help create and maintain well organized, professional looking web-sites, without the need for extensive help from technical staff. A prototype was built and then Apple Enterprise Software was contracted to build version 1.0 of SiteMaker. A pilot program was developed at the university for a select number of faculty to use the product. Because of the university-wide interest in using SiteMaker, Apple was contracted again to complete version 2.0. However, because of the commercial potential for SiteMaker, the University of Michigan began seeking a qualified development company committed to the further development, support and marketing of SiteMaker.
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Project Description: In 2001, an agreement was reached between the University of Michigan and Global Village Consulting, Inc. (GVC). The initial phase of the project was to revamp and cleanup the existing code, address some existing bugs and add a few new features to the GVC.SiteMaker product. This new 2.1 version ready for commercial release was released in November 2001. With this new version, the University of Michigan offered the use of GVC.SiteMaker (UM, SiteMaker) campus-wide.
Development continued to prepare SiteMaker for its first commercial release. This development included development of added features, such as the introduction of two deployment types of the now GVC.SiteMaker. Now, organizations making use of an system wide user authentication system (such as Kerberos) have the option to deploy GVC.SiteMaker making use of this for their internal users. Users not authenticated by this system would continue to be authenticated by GVC.SiteMaker. The first commercial release, version 2.5, was released in July 2002.
GVC continues to aggressively develop and improve GVC.SiteMaker. Recently releasing version 3.0 in March 2003, GVC has revamped the UI to improve the ease of use of GVC.SiteMaker, and has also added more new features, including an extremely unique and powerful feature called virtual tables.
With virtual tables, site owners are now able to incorporate database tables to their sites. A database can be easily created within a site as GVC.SiteMaker enables them to create a 'mini' database within the systems backend database. Through the easy to use UI, the site owner can make use of all the database functions (performing searches, sorting, default record displays, selection of field data to display, etc.) without knowing anything about database management or administration. Existing database records can be imported into a GVC.SiteMaker database table from a CSV file, enabling users to incorporate their existing database information. Similarily, users are able to export data from their GVC.SiteMaker database tables. How database records are displayed to users is controlled through the use of templates. Default templates are available, however experienced html users are able to create their own templates making how data is displayed constrained only by the limits of the user. Depending upon the permissions set by the site owner, viewers may be able to search from a pre-defined set of records or the entire database table, add records, and even edit specified fields within a record.
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