Use ICE to ease the pain of Clients needing "urgent" updates to their Web sites.
Oh I remember it so vividly… Back in the days when I had my own media agency, I did many websites for various Clients. And, the activity, which was probably most time consuming, was to correct or add content to their sites on a very regular basis. And these changes were also of the type which had to be done “right now”. Some of my Clients decided to get equipped with their own copy of GoLive, or Dreamweaver, but that meant additional software and training. This also meant that Clients had control over the design (and we all know how much Clients love large text, blinking GIFs, or have a weird and very personal color taste).
Well, InContext Editing (ICE) is a new online service that makes web content maintenance easy for both web designers, and content editors. We can now create editable pages very quickly with Dreamweaver CS4, and preserve their design integrity by controlling the areas that can be edited. Content editors can easily update their web pages, with no software installation or training required.
InContext Editing is ideal for:
- Freelance Web Designers
- Web Designers who work in small design shops
- Clients in small businesses or organizations
InContext Editing solves many problems by:
- Letting you define what parts of the pages can be edited, preserving integrity of your design.
- Enabling control over the level of edits, such as font styles or being able to upload images in a certain area.
- Creating a simple workflow with different client roles (Editor and Publisher)
- Eliminating the need for clients to install software, since all edits can be made directly from their browser.
- Dramatically reducing training time because of its common web based interface.
Besides helping you save time and money, InContext Editing could benefit your business by:
- Adding more value to your client solutions and offerings
- Not acting as a “bottleneck” when you can’t respond to urgent client requests immediately, right now, yesterday, …Reconnecting with past clients for older work that can now be easily updated
For more information:
- Sign-in page (all you need is your free Adobe ID).
- Live Demo.
- Product Overview.
- Developer Center.
- Comparison with Contribute CS4.
- FAQs.
Videos:
- Introducing InContext Editing [08:00].
- Getting Started with InContext Editing [10:37].
- More videos can be found at Adobe TV.
Enjoy! And let me know what you think.
Comments
Yeah. InContext is a handy, valuable tool. But watch out for Adobe starting to charge for it in the future, as soon as they have a bunch of us locked into it.
[Hi Bill, that Adobe will start charging for it is no secret (read the FAQs, linked to in this post). Think of it as a service, which can very easily be billed back to the Client anyway. Furthermore, paying for a service means that it will be monitored closely, and every effort will be made to keep it up and running just as any critical online tool. -Rufus]
Posted by: Bill Harrel | April 10, 2009 5:20 PM
And it would be so much better if it recognized Internet Explorer 8 instead of suggesting to use IE7. Compatibility View fixes it, but that really shouldn't be necessary. This is embarrassing - a mis-implemented browser detect...
[Hi Asbjørn, yes you are correct. As of today, ICE is not compatible with IE8 and Google Chrome. Cristinel Anastasoaie (Adobe InContext Editing Product Manager) wrote in the Adobe Forums (http://forums.adobe.com/thread/206301?tstart=60): "We are currently working on the planning support for Internet Explorer 8. The latest date this browser is going to be officially supported is October 09, but we might be able to release an update earlier with this fix included.
The support for Google Chrome is going to be addressed separately mainly because, although this is a popular browser among web developers, it will take some time until it will become an established browser for editors. We would most likely start by not stopping users from accessing the service through this browser and gradually move towards a full support". Cheers, -Rufus ]
Posted by: Asbjørn | April 10, 2009 9:38 PM