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LOWELL RAPAPORT
REVIEWS OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT AND WEB INTERACTION SYSTEMS
APPLICATION SERVICE PROVIDERS have hardly taken the content management market by storm, but one company, Atomz, has managed to build a sizeable customer base.
San Bruno, CA-based Atomz was launched in 1998 with the ASP-based Atomz Search service, which is now used on thousands of Web sites. The company's Atomz Publish offering, which debuted in January 2001, has attracted more than 40 customers to the approach of renting Web content management services for a fee of as little as $1,700 per month.
The subscription-based Atomz Publish Web content management service lets users upload Web site templates to Atoms servers, develop workflows around content development and approval and then upload content to create complete Web sites. The Web sites can then be hosted by Atomz, transferred to a user's own in-house server or hosted by a third-party ISP.
Atomz Publish is aptly named given its popularity for publish-and-- consume-oriented sites. These sites may have a million or more visitors per day, but they tend to have relatively few contributors. Currently, the largest Atomz Publish customers are managing up to six Web sites and have up to 30 licensed users.
One of Atomz Publish's most interesting features is its ability to let users visually compare old and new versions of content side by side in a Web browser. "The system lets users roll back to earlier versions of their Web sites," says Seth Brenzel, Atomz product manager. Atomz Publish makes a new version each time content is updated.
In other respects, Atomz Publish is much like other low- to mid-range Web content management systems. The system features administrator-- defined workflows for the development of content and Web templates. All content...