Five Reasons to Choose Vignette (or Not...)

By John Conroy and Irina Guseva Oct 7, 2008

2 comments

It's hard to know what the deal is with Vignette. Poor financial results and some unflattering press throughout the summer suggest all's not well with this aristocratic web and enterprise content management brand. But awards aplenty and an enduring client-base chock-full of marquee names suggests the opposite.

The company has been kicked around a little bit lately in the press. And so, cutting a long story short, we got in contact with Dave Dutch, senior VP for products and marketing, to give him the chance to craft some arguments for why our readers should pick Vignette ahead of its competitors. Wedged inline we also offer our own observations on these views. Pass the jump to burrow yourself in.

Reasons to Pick Vignette

1. Innovation

VIGN says:

Video is fast becoming a requirement for delivering an engaging and complete Web experience, and Vignette is the only company that provides a complete rich media solution that embraces the video-centric web. Think about the most engaging and interactive Web experiences you’ve had recently. I’ll bet 9 out of ten times, they involved some form of video. Vignette is the only major vendor that manages video, rich media and all other Web content from a single integrated platform.

Additionally, Vignette’s Web 2.0 platform enables social media and online communities (blogs, wikis, ratings, tagging, forums, etc.) while making content relevant and easy to find through recommendations, and personalization. Vignette is continuously innovating. Since the beginning of the year, we have released eleven products to the market.

CMSWire says:

Yes, Vignette is a proven innovator, but it's a stretch to say that it's the only company to provide a complete rich-media solution that embraces video. Pretty much everyone recognizes the importance of video nowadays, even relatively small players like EPiServer. That said, we give them kudos for offering solutions to specific verticals, and for doing so with a clean and usable media product. Although companies like eZ Systems and Clickability will claim the same, new packages like Vignette Media, focused on the media and publishing sectors, show great promise.

Offering social media features and blogs, wikis etc. is de rigeur by today's standards, and, while Vignette is solid in this regard, it is just one of a host of solution sets which will do the same.

2. Future Proof

VIGN says:

Vignette’s architecture and modern platform helps our customers do what they want to do now and can scale to meet the needs of what they will need to do two to five years from now. NASA is a great example: Four years ago, NASA recognized the need to offer a more engaging Web experience to their constituents. They had content unlike any other organization on the planet (photos of Black Holes, astronaut blogs and video of comets speeding across the galaxy), but no good way to share it with the public.

NASA bought Vignette Portal and the rest is history. Their award-winning MyNASA.gov site now contains millions of content items and can be personalized to meet the unique interests of any visitor. In fact, NASA liked what was happening with the external portal so much, that they’re now using Vignette for their employee and engineering portals. There’s a terrific story in the July edition of CIO magazine on NASA’s content management challenges.

Our approach of separating content management and content delivery gives our customers the ability to implement the most efficient workflows, publish syndication across multiple websites and have multi-channel delivery across various devices.