History and Current Status of GVC.SiteMaker

It started in 1998 with Dr. Jonathan Maybaum, Professor of Pharmacology, who at the time, served as Director of Academic Information Technology for the University of Michigan Medical Center. Dr. Maybaum wanted to provide Medical School faculty, students and staff with a tool to help create and maintain well organized, professional looking websites, without the need for extensive help from technical staff.

Due to the scope and complexity of this project, WebObjects was chosen as the development tool to create the desired solution. After creating the first prototype in 1999, Apple Enterprise Software (now Apple iServices) was contracted to complete version 1.0 of what was then called SiteMaker. This prototype was used by a select number of faculty users in 2000.

Although designed for use within the Medical School, other users within and outside the faculty found SiteMaker to be a very effective tool. Due to the level of acceptance university-wide, Apple iServices was again contracted to complete SiteMaker version 2.0 in 2001.

With the potential to commercialize SiteMaker, the University of Michigan began to seek a qualified development company that would be committed in the further developing, supporting and marketing of SiteMaker. In 2001, an agreement was reached with Global Village Consulting (GVC) because of their vast experience and proven abilities in WebObjects and enterprise application development. GVC promptly began adding new features and correcting some problems in version 2.0, and completed version 2.1 in November 2001. This version was the first version used campus-wide at the University of Michigan.

Since then Ann Arbor Public Schools and Holland Christian Schools have contracted the use of, what is now known as, GVC.SiteMaker to help in creating and publishing their district websites and to provide individual schools and teachers with flexible, yet powerful web publishing capabilities.

GVC continues to aggressively develop and improve GVC.SiteMaker. Releasing version 3.0 in March 2003, GVC improved the ease of use of GVC.SiteMaker and also added an extremely unique and powerful feature called virtual database tables. Recently releasing version 3.1 in December 2003, GVC has again improved on the already developed features as well as added additional Administration features including site request workflow, better searching, and easier management of the GVC.SiteMaker system. In addition to these features, site configuration can now include automatic email notification when database records are added and/or modified, as well as enabling access groups to use an LDAP server. With the incorporation of Unicode UTF-8, users can now develop sites content in English, Spanish, Persian, Manderin, or any other language with no extra steps or technical requirements.

Version 3.5 was released in January 2005. This newest version saw the development of website configuration features requested by the existing user base. Now individual pages can be developed and tagged as unpublished until ready for viewing. As well, file upload and management enables multiple files to be uploaded at once. Virtual folders enable files to be organized for easier management. An HTML editor is now available making advanced page display even easier for novice users.

Version 3.6 was released in June 2005 as an Open Source project under the Educational Community License, with the distributions hosted at SourceForge. GVC and the University of Michigan decided to release GVC.SiteMaker as Open Source to make it easier to adopt and to take advantage of the potential of a community of developers. In light of these latest developments and with a proven and successful track record with respectable universities and K-12 institutions,GVC.SiteMaker is successfully arousing significant interest globally.

Version 4.0 was released in April 2006. This version features a new section type, Mixed Media, that allows up to four different pieces of content to be blended on one page. The driving force behind this was the creation of on-line courses. Other new features include streamlined editing of text/image sections, the ability to duplicate a single section within a site, and login/logout links.