Openpages Inc., which designs enterprise content management systems, will announce Monday that its ContentWare application has been integrated with Dreamweaver, Macromedia Inc.'s dominant Web authoring tool.

The Dreamweaver extension, which will be distributed through an Openpages upgrade to be released to customers sometime in the second quarter of this year, allows enterprise Web designers and developers to publish HTML pages through ContentWare without ever leaving the Dreamweaver application. This is important because many other enterprise content management systems require that documents created in outside applications be uploaded, copied or batched to the content production system.

Brad Haigis, director of product development for Openpages, says integration with Dreamweaver is a win for just about all of the company's customers. "Dreamweaver was a logical choice to extend content production capabilities for our customers and prospects. Dreamweaver has broad acceptance across our customer base--very broad."

Matt Brown, Macromedia's third-party-relations manager for Dreamweaver and UltraDev, says the partnership will benefit his company as well. "This really extends the Dreamweaver platform and is part of a movement now going on to show people that we're about more than just creating HTML pages," he says. "We're a company that covers all your Web needs."

While partnerships of this kind are nothing new for Macromedia--the company has about 100 similar partnerships--this is the highest level of integration it has seen with an enterprise content management system. Brown says from a technological perspective, as least from Macromedia's viewpoint, this partnership was an easy one to consummate because it has an open API that's relatively "well-known" to developers.

While this may be Macromedia's first fully integrated partnership with an enterprise content management system, Brown says don't think it will be the last one for Macromedia, which holds roughly 75% of the Web authoring tool market share. "It's fairly clear that from the enterprise level on down the hierarchy, companies are going to have to deal with new media," he says.

And by integrating with a range of different Web-based technologies--but not being a core part of the applications--Brown says Macromedia holds an advantage over its competitors by being in many different spaces at once. "Nobody else does that like we do," Brown claims. "Obviously that puts us at the top of the heap."

Haigis says the Dreamweaver announcement strengthens Openpages' position among its core base of customers--55 percent to 60 percent of which are publishing companies such as newspapers and magazines--while also bolstering its standing in the eyes of prospective customers whose core business is not publishing but nonetheless conduct business on the Web.

"One of our core strengths is the rich integration with tools used to produce content," he says, adding that Dreamweaver fits nicely into the company's existing set of assets. Openpages also integrates with Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop, among other applications.

Haigis says the Dreamweaver deal is a pure partnership, in that there is no revenue sharing or similar financial arrangement. Openpages spent about five months from start to finish integrating Dreamweaver with its ContentWare application, though Haigis notes that the Dreamweaver project was part of a larger upgrade that's being developed.

Asked whether Openpages plans any further deals like this with Macromedia products, Haigis replies, "Suffice it to say that we're working on more."