Vignette's VCM V8 Finally Made It

It’s been 7 years since the last major release of Vignette Content Management (7.0). If you wondered about the fate of the promised last year VCM V8 in the light of Vignette’s (news, site) various tribulations and the Open Text acquisition, worry not. It is officially here.

Using descriptives like “ergonomic design,” “engaging web experience” and “ultra modern personalized workspaces,” Open Text and Vignette are hoping it would have a much better installed base response than VCM 7 seemed to have when it came out.

What Changed From VCM 7 to 8

The looks is one of them. As Vignette told us before they became part of OTEX, UI has undergone a major rework in this version.

GUI Changes and New Functionalities

There are two main views in VCM 8:

1. Preview environment for page-centric, in-context management approach
2. Work spaces for content-centric and bulk operations

Content workspaces in VCM 8 where content is managed independently from the presentation.

 Personalized floating menu on the right to manipulate content at the page level. Sample sites are shipped with out-of-the-box content type, workflow and presentation assets.

Users will see multiple productivity enhancements like smart lists, last used, quick actions, search and filter, shortcuts, AJAX-enabled no full page refreshes, minimization of pop-ups, etc.

In VCM V8, drag and drop is enabled in multiple places. The interface got more user-friendly action label names (e.g., save and close) and easier way of getting to most common tasks via tabs and menus, with easier access to system metadata.

Re-order and add items, browse content in contextual, multidimensional workspaces by site, content type, folder, category or explorer views.

For marketers, a new concept of vanity URLs allows to explicitly add a new URL to any page for marketing campaigns and landing pages.

In-context management is one of major improvements with the ability to add new content in the preview environment and create new pages based on default layouts with default content that can be kept as is or changed.

Publishing and workflow have turned into more of a couple of clicks operations without users being exposed to multiple technical concepts.

Site Cloning and Presentation

On the presentation and site management side, more functionality like site creation and site cloning has been exposed to non-technical users allowing for shorter time to market and (after it’s all set up) not having to go to IT. The new presentation management capabilities include theme management, page by page, or template by template management.

Changing page layout from in-context view

This approach for layout management is based on default templates or preregistered CSS and XHTML.

VCM 8’s themes concept allows to keep the content the same, but change the look and feel.

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Tags: enterprise cms, open text, vcm v7, vcm v8, vignette

It’s been 7 years since the last major release of Vignette Content Management (7.0). If you wondered about the fate of the promised last year VCM V8 in the light of Vignette’s (news, site) various tribulations and the Open Text acquisition, worry not. It is officially here.