1995/09/18
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Vermeer: any server, any time - Vermeer Technologies' FrontPage Web
authoring software - Product Announcement

RELease 1.0, Sept 18, 1995

In 1992, Charles Ferguson was a management consultant with a book in the
works (Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global
Technology, published by Times Books/Random House in March, 1993).
During his engagements with Apple, Motorola and others, he began to see
how hard companies had to work -- and how much they had to invest -- to
develop materials for closed online services. He envisioned an
environment and an architecture that was more open, standardized,
flexible and powerful than the proprietary systems then in use.

By 1994, Ferguson was tempted to start a software company that would
develop a standard infrastructure for online services. Then the Web
began to gain momentum and he realized that someone else had invented
the environment that he was looking for, but that the tools to make
things easier to create were missing. So he decided to focus on
Web-development software tools.

On the recommendation of a friend at MIT, he hired Randy Forgaard (who
was working on BeyondMail at Banyan) as his technical lead. The two
founded Vermeer Technologies in early, 1995, with $4 million in seed
capital from Matrix Partners, Sigma Partners and Atlas Venture (see
Release 1.0, 5-95). The company is growing quickly.

The buttoned-down approach

Rather than compete with Web browsers and servers, Vermeer's approach is
to make as many of those products, users its customers as possible. Its
product suite, called FrontPage, has four components. The server
component, Vermeer FrontPage Server Extensions, can add functionality to
most Web servers, including the save-to-site feature described above.
That means a Web developer could create sites transparently on multiple
servers, as long as she had access privileges and the server owner added
the Vermeer extensions. The extensions offer user-access control and
support collaborative features such as author collision detection, so
that two people don't modify the same page at the same time.

Vermeer's other three components -- FrontPage Explorer, Editor and To Do
List -- run on the client side. Explorer is similar to NaviSoft's
MiniWeb browser, but it's more organized. Its left pane has an Outline
view with a list of files similar to that of the Windows 95 Explorer;
its right pane has a Link view that offers a bird's-eye Web view. Unlike
the MiniWeb, which allows icons and links to proliferate on screen until
they become difficult to follow, FrontPage Explorer displays inbound
links to the left of the node in question and outbound links to the
right. Whatever page is selected in the outline view is in the center of
the Link view (see screen shot, previous page). FrontPage Explorer
cannot automatically follow a Website's links and mirror them locally,
as NaviPress can.

Double-clicking on a page icon in the Explorer launches the FrontPage
Editor, an elegant WYSIWYG page editor with many useful extras to help
developers avoid HTML, URLs, Perl, Tcl and C, wherever possible. The
extras include templates, step-by-step Webwizards and support for most
Netscape extensions. They also include WebBots that automate Web
components that usually require programming, such as text-search query
forms, threaded discussion groups, Website registration screens and
comment-submission forms.

The combination of wizards and templates is powerful and offers rapid
deployment of relatively complex Websites that include automatically
regenerated tables of contents, common headers and footers, and a To Do
List of things to replace, import or create in order to finish the site.
There's also a tool to create clickable hot zones in graphics, which, by
the way, the program can import and convert to a Web-friendly format
transparently.

The tool suite supports multi-user Website development, including
transparent porting of an entire Website from one site/server to any
other, including all associated programs. Vermeer is also developing
APIs for database access, text search and document management. In 1996,
the company will add electronic commerce capabilities and stronger
database support.

Vermeer is shipping its products in a few weeks and will announce them
formally in October. It will ship client software for Windows 3.1, 95
and NT, and server software on those OSes plus several flavors of Unix.
A Mac version is due in early 1996. For $600, customers will get the
client software, a personal Web server and the server extensions (the
client software isn't useful by itself; the customer can use practically
any Web server). To stay current with Web developments and if possible
help shape them, Vermeer is active in the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

COPYRIGHT 1995 EDventure Holdings, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group