Ezesite, a Trailblazer for Online Editing, Dies at 9

On Sunday, August 1^st 1999, I remember coding until 3 a.m. the night before Internet World 1999 in Sydney. The next day we unveiled Ezesite and it was the start of a fun ride of launching "Geoz".

Geoz was quickly renamed Ephox and Ezesite became EditLive! but the following blurb is quite an accurate description of what the product does even today:

Geoz's Ezesite product was developed to assist our clients to provide and manage constantly changing content on a new and information-oriented web site. They wanted a system that could be maintained by their office staff from offices around Australia as part of their normal job without the need for special software or web site management knowledge. Thus, we have been developing web site content publishing and site management software that will work in an Internet browser. Such software can be used to edit a one package site or in association with database technology to drive a complex publishing site.

The actual technology from those days went onto a few more names too with its last being the "EditLive! ActiveX SDK". At its' pinnacle it fought tooth and nail with Ektron's eWebEditPro for feature supremacy. However, by 2001 we knew that we really needed something to differentiate us other than yet another toolbar button so we started redeveloping the product to enable cross platform usage. Mac compatibility was a requirement we were hearing a lot from customers and there were really no good solutions on the market. The trick was that building a very good cross platform editor required A LOT of work and it probably took us another 3 or 4 years before the new cross platform version was better than the original VB-based code base.

After many years of pushing forward on the new code we finally have announced that we will end-of-life EditLive! ActiveX SDK at the end of 2008, 9 and ½ years on from its start in life. Although I suspect there are probably less than 50 customers still on the old technology I hope you don't find migrating across to the new EditLive! architecture too difficult. The team has written up some docs that explain the process.

The good news of course is that despite of the phase out of this technology (it was written on VB after all!) the EditLive! brand will power on into future as one of the world's leading online authoring solutions. Technologies change, but believe it or not I still feel we are in the very early days of adoption of online content creation. If we continue to create innovative products and services that matters to our customers I have no doubt that we will have a chance to throw EditLive!, the solution, a 21^st birthday party.

Thank you to all the developers including Andy Herron who have worked on the product. I am really sorry about that VB code :) Andy Herron, the key engineer on the product for the last few years, announces the end of an era over on his blog.

For some additional nostalgia here is the presentation that we used at Internet World 1999.

(BTW - even Ezesite version 0.1 was better than the crappy TypePad editor. Gahhhh!!!)