Content Management Matters ™

Once upon a time personalization was a magic and wonderful word. The promises came and went, largely unfulfilled. That's not to say that the technology didn't work. It did. Nor is it to say that the basic ideas were bad. They weren't. The problems by and large were related to how people attempted to use the stuff and the complexities and costs related to integrating it.

Amazon and others have continued to pursue the grail, if in modest strokes. Now were seeing web content management vendors investing in this direction. I say "grand!" If it's done simply and with out too much ambition, personalization can be a great tool.

We often bring you news of financial successes and troubles of content management vendors in the industry. This time, happy cheers come from a related product line -- online HTML editor tools -- produced by Ephox. With the line up of integration partners, it's no wonder they are doing well.

Video sharing site Vidavee, most famously known for working on video integration with The Huffington Post, has been acquired by enterprise CMS provider Vignette. This move comes after a large demand by Vignette's customers to provide rich media integration.

The announcement also comes fresh off the heels of Vignette's announcement of their Web Experience Platform.

At the same as Enterprise Content Management Provider Vignette is reporting lower expected earnings partially from a decrease in spending in the North American market, open source enterprise content management provider Alfresco is announcing a financial rock solid end to 2007. And 2008 is looking even brighter.

Enterprise Content Management vendor Vignette has announced it's first quarter financial results and they are a bit lower than originally expected. The lower outlook is primarily a result of a decrease in license revenues which Vignette attributes to the a decrease in spending in the North American market.

With the US economy on a decline, will we see more ECM vendors making the same announcements over the next the year?

Vignette understands the importance of providing a dynamic, relevant and most of all, speedy web experience for customers. It's kicking things up a notch with its latest High-Performance Delivery (HPD) software; an expansion on its Web Experience Platform.

HPD delivers a unique caching technology that automatically tracks dependencies on publishing events or site changes and immediately updates the Web site cache when those changes occur, helping organizations deliver faster and richer user experiences with emphasis on speed, speed, speed!

There was a time when customization was all the rage. It wasn't enough to just get your message out, you had to try to tap into what made the user tick and figure out what they'd do next based on what they just did. It turned out that too much personalization was a little creepy. After all, not all of us are that calculated as to know what our next move is, never mind the next book we'll read or song we'll download.

Leave us alone, the user cried.

But with the advent of the Semantic Web upon us, we are promised great fortune and fame, or at least the prospect of knowing that when I say "I'm fine", it really means that I want you to ask me more about my day. And the Semantic Web will ask, because it's determined to be everything the current Web isn't.

Vignette understands that the pull of Web 3.0 is getting stronger. So they are taking another stab at personalization and have announced three new product releases, aimed at delivering more personal and engaging Web experiences to an organization's key audiences.

Looking for a platform solution to deliver a superior online experience for your customers? Well aren't we all?? Enterprise Content Management Provider Vignette has announced their new Web Experience Platform designed just for this purpose.

Let's take a peek and see what's in their solution offering...

Vignette has secured three US patents for core elements of its Web CMS and collaboration suite.

The news caps a busy twelve months for its developers, which launched a marquee new product in Vignette Digital Services Hub, before posting disappointing Q3 financial results, then bounced back with the launch of a well-received new version of Vignette Content Management.

Programming and software development is a thankless task, and you need all the help you can get, right?

Rubbish. You get paid a fortune and can stroll in at midday in a ZZ Top beard and pyjamas, and nobody in a suit ever talks to you because they have no idea what you actually do.

What the suits should do, of course, is ship you all off to a military barber for a #1, and then off to Qatar for six weeks of basic military training. That'd take the wind out of your sails. And while you're at it, stop off in Hong Kong on the way back for some tailored suits. It wouldn't kill you to look respectable once in a while.

Life is far too easy for you developers. Unfortunately, if you are in the business of coding for the Vignette suite of Enterprise CMS (and other) products, it's just gotten even easier.

Once the domain of niche players and home grown applications, established CMS vendors are moving into the realm of rich media asset management. One such well-known provider, Vignette, makes a play with the announcement of its Rich Media Services add-on module.

Vignette has seen better days. This period the company's Q3 revenues are expected to fall 10 percent (between US$ 42 million and US$ 44 million), a significant disparity from the US$ 46 million to US$ 50 million it forecast in July.

But life was good over the summer. Vignette had just built a hub of multimedia services. Tides are notably quick to turn.

CEO Mike Aviles explains part of Vignette's current problem can be attributed to sub-par licensing revenue this quarter.

But a tough Q3 hasn't stopped Vignette from powering forward. The company just announced the availability of a fresh version of Vignette Content Management.

This is the third and final article in our series on migrating content from a previous version of Vignette to Vignette V7. The first article in the series painted the broad overview and in the last article we talked in detail about the Content Analysis part of the process. Now, we continue by digging into the final planning phase: Defining the Migration Approach.

When we left off from part one in this series, we mentioned that there are four steps involved in the content life cycle migration process -- analyzing the content, deciding on a migration approach, the actual migration and post-migration processing. Here in part two, we go into detail on the Content Analysis step.

Vignette revamped its Web Content Management technology with version V7 to adopt industry standards J2EE, XML and Web Services. While this move helped customers lower total cost of ownership by leveraging open standards and application server services, it posed new challenges in migrating existing sites running on earlier versions V5/V6.

V7 introduced an entirely new architecture, making V6 implementations almost obsolete. Customers going for the V7 platform have to model, design and rebuild the site.

Along with re-engineering the site, one of the most critical tasks in V7 migration is to rebuild the content into new V7 server from an old story server. As re-creating the whole site content is quite a tedious task, customers might wonder if there is any way out.