Open Text (Somewhat) Starts Vocalizing Vignette Plans

Open Text has finally revealed a bit more information about what the giant plans to do with its multiple WCM offsprings. More specifically, where the recently adopted Vignette child may be placed in Open Text’s Enterprise CMS and Web CMS families.

“Our plan is not to eliminate products, but to offer solutions that help our customers effectively fulfill their unique, organizational needs,” said John Shackleton, president and CEO of Open Text.

The product architectures and technologies are quite different. And it is still not clear yet how this WCM/ECM quilting exercise (Open Text should really patent this phrase) will go on. At this time, however, there are no planned migrations of customers from one platform to another. Open Text is “not going to force anyone in either customer base,” according to Scott Bowen, Sr. VP at Open Text.

Saying that Vignette adds the right technologies to the portfolio at the right time, Open Text plans to leverage Vignette Content Management (VCM) as the foundation of Open Text’s Web business solutions, aiming to cover all possible content management implementation use cases from basic to sophisticated deployments, while utilizing both RedDot’s and Vignette’s “historic strengths,” adds Bowen.

Within the next 24 months, Open Text is looking to launch a “singular WCM product offering” that will combine key strengths of Web Solutions and Vignette.

Other plans:

• The release of the long-anticipated Vignette Content Management version 8.0 (VCM v8) is still on track for H2 2009.
• The recently released Web Solutions 10.0 will be followed by Web Solutions 10.1 in H1 2010.
• Vignette Social Media Solutions (Community Applications and Community Services) will be the basis of a new Social Marketplace offering as part of Open Text Social Media.
• Vignette Collaboration will continue to be enhanced as part of the underlying Vignette Social Media technology stack.
• Vignette’s Transactional Content Management product line (think SAP and Oracle integrations, B2B and eCommerce) should see the light of day at some point.

More on CMWire.com

Autonomy-cally IDOLized Interwoven TeamSite Hits the Streets

That was quick. Only two days after finalizing the earlier announced acquisition intent (and while the planned Interwoven Q1 2009 layoffs are supposedly underway), Autonomy announced the first post-acquisition product release. The company’s WCM product Interwoven Teamsite in its new 6.7.2 version is now running on Autonomy’s IDOL platform.

(a little) More detail on what IDOL brings to the table is on CMSWire: First Post-Acquisition Release: IDOLized Interwoven TeamSite

The word on the twittersphere has it that the release hit the WCM streets a bit prematurely and a lot more integration work between the products could’ve been done. Coulda, shoulda, woulda… But the £561M investement apparently cannot wait.

Even web content management in Autonomy’s hands is revolving more and more around search and (surely, soon to come) legal compliance.