Small-scale CM

Many midsize organizations don’t want to convert their entire external site to a hosted model. Rather, the goal is to unburden Webmasters from maintaining smaller sections, such as HR job postings, press releases, and investor information. MindHarbor offers its .Net-based mmprove as an option for these situations, as well as for basic intranets (see screenshot). 

MindHarbor’s product solves many of the issues other software services do, but to a lesser degree. For starters, the installation fee ranges from $100 to $200, and there’s a $10 monthly charge for each area of your site that’s updated. Still, the service has a few high-end attributes. For example, publishing content to MindHarbor servers -- or to your own ISP or in-house infrastructure -- requires minimal setup time, typically less than a day.

This service’s intuitive control panel provides a tabular content listing that’s arranged by zones -- discrete areas of your site converted to mmprove. From here, authors easily edit pages or add content based on templates for each zone.  

Beyond its clean look, the content-editing interface offers CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) class preview, so you know how text or layouts will appear prior to publishing. In addition, users can set live and expiration dates for pages.

Administrators get minimal control, such as creating users and assigning them to zones. There is no workflow, nor are any design functions open to developers; the latter task is done by MindHarbor staff.

Still, this inexpensive Web-based solution simplifies Web maintenance. Because it’s easily integrated with existing sites, deployment time and effort may be less than with other content management services.