[Sigia-l] "vignette story (was Study: Content Management Tools Fail)"

[Karl Fast]

> One client installed a million-dollar Vignette system that was so
> complex and non-functional they had to hire a small staff to take
> over all content entry.

A story about Vignette that folks might like.

About three years ago I was in San Jose for Intranets 2000. At the
speakers dinner I sat beside someone from C|Net. Knowing that
Vignette started as a homegrown CMS for C|Net I took the opportunity
to ask questions.

First, I asked which C|Net properties this fellow had worked on.
"Pretty much all of them," he answered. "C|Net, News.com, Snap!,
Gamespot" and so on.

Then I asked what his job was. He did "content production" or
something like that. Basically he was an editor in charge of
managing the content production process and publishing stuff.

"So step me through this," I asked. "Describe to me how you take a
story from an idea through the writing and editing process all the
way to publication on the web."

"Sure. That's what I do all day. So first thing we do is start
Microsoft Word."

"Huh?" I said. "Don't you use StoryServer? Isn't that supposed to be
a complete content management system? You guys invented it, right?"

"Ummm, yeah" he said. "But everyone writes their documents in Word.
We edit in Word. We pass it all around in email. The StoryServer
tools for this aren't so good. Once we've approved the article we
cut-and-paste that into StoryServer, select a template, add the
necessary markup and macro calls, test the result, get final
sign-off, and then publish. StoryServer is used only at the end
after we know what we're going to say and how it's going to look."

I was a wee bit stunned. They would edit in Word and then
CUT-AND-PASTE into StoryServer? What were people buying from
Vignette? Sounded like they were paying a lot of money for some Tcl
scripts, a few macros, some caching technology (which I hear isn't
as sophisticated as Vignette makes it sound), and not much else.

No, I don't know who the guy was (though I probably have his card in
a shoebox somewhere).

No, I have never personally used Vignette.

Yes, this was three years ago and Vignette has probably improved
it's editing tools in the interim. However, I would be willing to
bet that lots of Vignette customers still use Word, route documents
by email, and then cut-n-paste as needed. 

Note that what used to be called StoryServer and is now called
"Vignette Content Management" which comes in several different
flavors depending on the size of your organization and your
checkbook.


--karl