Vignette (software)

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Vignette Corporation
Type Public
Founded 1995, Sigma Partners
Headquarters Austin, Texas (registered)
Key people Mike Aviles , Chief Executive Officer
Industry content management, portal, collaboration, document management, and records management
Employees about 900 (2008)
Website www.vignette.com


Vignette is a suite of Content management, portal, collaboration, document management, and records management products developed by the Vignette Corporation, headquartered in Austin, Texas.

Vignette V7 is the latest version of the Enterprise content management product. It consists of several suites of products allowing non-technical business users to rapidly create, edit and track content through workflows, and then publish this content through Web or portal sites. The appearance of delivery applications can be controlled via templates.

Many large content-rich sites on the World Wide Web run Vignette. This includes Lexmark, Nokia, Wachovia, Time-Warner, Fox News Digital and the OECD. Vignette provided the technical platform for the Athens 2004 Olympic Games Web site. One of the most successful implementation using Vignette product is the NASA website, which has been running on Vignette since 2004. Recently NASA's mission to Mars has been a major focus to people all around the globe, therefore it was crucial deliver up to date content and a stable environment to over 250,000 users viewing the mission control proceedings on NASA TV, with more than 50,000 simultaneously connected to the Website at one time. NASA's website in 2004 had more than 60 million unique visitors and over 550 million page views and 17.5 billion hits.

Vignette also provides integration solutions for ERP, CRM and legacy systems.

The Vignette platforms provide support for Java EE and .NET. For the former, the JSR 168 specification is implemented. Sites running versions of Vignette software prior to V7 are generally easy to identify by the format of their story URLs, which are mostly numeric strings with several commas as separators.


[edit] History

In 1995 Ross Garber and Neil Webber started Vignette with the goal of making web publishing easier and more personalized. The company was funded by Bob Davoli at Sigma Partners (an early stage venture capital firm). Davoli had worked with founders Ross Garber and Neil Webber when he was CEO of Epoch Systems (another Sigma company) in the early 1990s.

Early in its history, Vignette had problems coming up with working technology. CNET had a similar technology technology called Prism that it used on its site. CNET, which wanted a third-party to commercialize the product, decided to spin the technology off to Vignette, which merged Prism with its existing product and released Story Server. CNET also invested $500,000 for a 33% stake in Vignette and helped the company raise $27.8 million from VC firms that included Austin Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Adobe Ventures. [1]

In 1990's Vignette's IDE and API were superior to traditional CGI/vi/Perl Web development and gained much popularity and customer base because of convenience and usability. In 1998, after barely three years of being in business, Vignette had already signed up 130 customers.

The company made several key acquisitions over the years including the acquisition of e-business application vendor OnDisplay for $1.4B in 2000[2], enterprise portal software vendor Epicentric for $32M in 2003[3], CMS vendor Instraspect for $20M in 2003[4], and Tower Technology, an Australian-based provider of enterprise document and records management solutions, in 2004 for $125M[5].

[edit] Products

[edit] Vignette Content Management

Vignette Content Management is a powerful solution for creating and managing content for enterprise Internet, extranet or intranet applications. It is designed to engage the capabilities of key Web content contributors and administrators, no matter their skill level, while providing enriched management tools to site developers and designers.

Vignette Content Management is designed for organizations that place strategic emphasis on their online channel. Vignette's product was the first of its kind in the early days of the Internet. Today it powers some of the largest and most complex Web sites in the world.

In support of the specialized roles and business-critical requirements typical of today's enterprise Web sites, Vignette Content Management meets the distinct needs of content contributors, designers, Web developers and administrators. With the rich and deep functionality that such an enterprise application demands, its significant usability features simplify and streamline the content contribution process and enable organizations to deliver richer, more interactive end-user experiences.


[edit] Vignette Application Portal

It's well-established that portals are effective vehicles for personalizing Web content and directing applications and application outputs to target groups and individuals. In their most active form, portals can also be used to build mashups, encourage communities of interests, share team projects and foster collaboration inside and outside the organization. Vignette Application Portal can be easily integrated with Vignette Content Management System as well as other content management systems.

[edit] Vignette Collaboration

First-generation end-user collaboration technologies like blogs, wikis and forums, for all of their crudeness and limitations, have demonstrated the appetite the public has for online community and participation. As organizations evolve their responses to these appetites, the limitations of first-generation technologies become obvious very quickly.

[edit] Records and Document Management

  • Vignette Images and Documents Management (IDM)
  • Vignette Records and Document (VRD)

[edit] Vignette Portal Solutions

The software enables businesses to build numerous Web sites and applications, all with the same set of tools. Combined with Vignette's Web site authoring tools, the software is designed to help companies set up Web pages and create information delivered through them. The Vignette Portal Suite is build primarily upon the Epicentric Foundation Server, which they acquired in 2003.

[edit] Acquisitions

  • OnDisplay (2000)
  • Epicentric (2003)
  • TOWER Technology Pty Limited (2004)
  • Intraspect
  • Towers Technology (2004)
  • Vidavee (2008)

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] External links