It's always been a bit difficult to explain how Contribute works. It's a web page editor of sorts, but rather than creating and designing websites from scratch, Contribute concentrates on updating and maintaining the pages within an existing site.

The idea is that you get a professional web designer or team to do all the hard work for you. They set up the main site, using specialised web design tools such as Dreamweaver or Indesign. Once the site has been set up, non-professional users, such as marketing or sales staff, can then use Contribute to make routine changes, such as updating price lists or adding information about new products.

Of course, you could just give all your staff their own copy of Dreamweaver, but at more than £300 per head that would soon become extremely expensive. Contribute costs just £99 and you can buy a six-user package for just £469, so it's a cost-effective way of giving basic web editing tools to larger groups of people.

With this in mind, previous versions of Contribute have concentrated on providing simple editing tools that could easily be used by people who didn't have any special training in web design. This upgrade does provide some new editing tools, but its emphasis is much more on administration and many of the new features are aimed at the professional design and IT staff who will be supervising other Contribute users.

On the editing side, there's improved support for cascading style sheets, as well as the ability for administrators to specify which styles can be used to edit web pages. There's also support for Macromedia's 'Flashpaper 2' format, which is a kind of Acrobat pdf clone. It allows you to convert any existing document, such as an Excel spreadsheet, into a Flashpaper file that can be inserted into a web page.

It goes one step further than pdf though, as it allows you to insert video, animations or any type of content supported by the Flash (.swf) file format.

Macromedia has also thrown in a small group of image-editing controls that allow you to crop or rotate an image, or alter its brightness and contrast. But that's pretty much it as far as new editing and design features go.

The rest of the new features concentrate on administration and collaboration. The first one you'll notice is the new 'Send For Review' button that appears at the top of the main editing window. When you've finished working on a web page you can hit this button to send a draft of the new page to a colleague for their comments or approval.

When you use this option, or make any other changes to your website, Contribute creates an 'audit trail' that lists all the work you've done on your project. You can view your own audit trail within your personal copy of the program, but Contribute is now accompanied by a second program called Contribute Publishing Services (CPS). This acts as a central administation program that allows the main administrator to monitor and control everyone on the network that is using Contribute to edit the website.

The CPS program does provide great control for administrators, such as the ability to set up email notifications whenever users make certain types of changes to the site. However, it does suggest that Macromedia is now concentrating on the corporate market and is less interested in some of the smaller businesses and organisations that also use Contribute.

The program doesn't make any great strides as an HTML editing tool either, so users in smaller businesses may well feel that this isn't a 'must-have' upgrade. However, the improved administration tools will make it much more attractive for larger organisations that have lots of people using the program.

Our one big criticism is that the documentation and online Help files provided by Macromedia are pretty poor. They're peppered with marketing waffle - leverage this, deploy that - and have the annoying habit of merely listing features without giving you any real idea of how those features work. Macromedia really needs to write a proper user manual rather than just bombarding people with marketing hype.

Contact: Macromedia 0131 458 6766
www.macromedia.com/uk

System requirements:

• 300MHz processor
• Windows 98 SE or later
• 128MB of Ram
• 120MB hard disk space for full installation