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ORWELL, Vermont, November 5 2001 -- Digital Spinner, a web design and applications development company, announced today the fifth release candidate of the GroupIT Engine (http://www.groupit.org), a PHP-based content management and group collaboration system capable of powering the next generation of web sites, intranets and extranets. The entire source code for the GroupIT Engine is available for download at http://www.groupit.org.

The GroupIT Engine is a content management system (CMS) borne from several years of research, development and deployment. As a product, the GroupIT Engine installs with a comprehensive set of functioning pages that perform many of the jobs required to deploy and manage a corporate Intranet, public web site or online community. "It's a bit like an Intranet-in-a-tarball, packaged in such a way so that people can quickly dive into the rich functionality of the engine without wasting time building a web site simply for review." says Sean Pecor, president of Digital Spinner, Inc.

GroupIT's amazing browser management approach provides the ability to create and maintain any number of pages and sub-pages (defined as categories, sections or libraries). Pages can be added, removed and modified without typing in one line of HTML. "We have clients building mini-Extranets within a single Intranet in just minutes. With GroupIT you can create any number of dynamic content sections that enable the sharing of documents, events, articles, images, messages and links." said Pecor. "Additional plugins can be developed to handle any type of content."

GroupIT's innovative template mechanism can support any layout design. Any number of templates can be utilized for any number of pages. An administrator can add any number of user accounts to any number of security roles and workgroups. "You can even override a user's security on a per-page and/or per-workgroup basis," continues Pecor. "Being able to define minimum read, write and editorial security level and/or workgroup requirements on a per-page basis is a rare feature we're particularly proud of."

Any dynamic content forum can be open or moderated. A comprehensive administrative web site allows direct access to the database back-end, and provides detailed reports concerning membership, security, activity and content. Bug tracking technology sends SMTP alerts immediately upon errors, transmitting full environment information to the web site administrator for quick problem resolution. In addition, GroupIT provides the ability to create and maintain a web site in multiple languages.

The system installs in a few minutes using a browser-based kickstart script. It requires a Unix flavored server (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, ...), the Mysql database server, the Apache web server and PHPv4.01 or newer. The entire source code of the GroupIT Engine is available for download and use under the terms of the "Orchestrated Original Source License", which restricts distributing modified versions of GroupIT but allows anyone to make their own modifications and to distribute modifications as separate plug-ins or packages. Use of GroupIT in research and development environments, and for personal use, is made possible under OOSL at no charge. Competitively priced commercial and academic licenses are available that include unlimited email technical support.

About Digital Spinner, Inc.