[Sigia-l] Re: Responses of the Automated workflow in a web-based content management system

[Andrew Otwell]

Someboday wrote on CMS and automated workflow:

> There's
> no such thing as an "ideal" workflow: since every organization and
> every user would have a different idea of what that is. The Vignette
> installations I've seen tried to be ideal, customizable, automated
> workflows and they were giant piles of crap.

I'll second that. The large Vignette installation I worked on (someone else
got paid about a million bucks for it) was literally unusable. Not "unusable
as in hard to use," but "unusable as in not working in any way."

Although I've had only this one experience with Vignette, my impression was
that they were at that time (can't say for now) basically crooks: they
insisted that they had automated solutions for _any_ possible sequence of
business-related tasks, when in fact they had nothing but programers who
were willing to tackle those problems.

In addition, it was very clear that "automated workflows" meant "our way or
the highway". AFAIK, Vignette never analyzed any existing real-world
workflows or did any investigation into to the client's methods before
building the system. The Vignette system was intended to replace a set of
home-grown perl scripts that two guys managed for a company of several
thousand. It brings a tear to the eye.