Integrated Content Management: Order from Chaos
by Vignette
An effective Internet infrastructure can bring order to chaos. It is capable of supporting a diverse range of business requirements and therefore requires solutions that allow systems, applications and people to share information, supporting critical business processes, both within and between enterprises. Organizations should be able to leverage the data from different internal and external applications, from the internal ERP and sales systems to the business and trading partners' information that will provide effective business systems.
Enterprises need an underlying architecture that emphasizes security, interoperability, platform independence and easy integration of applications and business partners. This solution must be flexible and support international and emerging standards and technologies as well as interfaces to e-marketplaces and established systems, such as EDI systems. It should allow for the definition, execution and management of business processes and provide mechanisms for continuous improvements of those processes. The solution should provide common, centralized management services such as administrative consoles, system and business partner configuration, security and audit capabilities.
Integrated content management applications allow customers, business partners and employees to interact with the enterprise consistently and in real-time, providing control and management, while maintaining brand and user experience.
We develop and deliver Internet software and services that enable organizations to interact online with their customers, employees and partners. Vignette is the leading provider of integrated content management applications used by the most successful organizations like UBS Paine Webber, Daimler-Chrysler, The Wall Street Journal, AMD and United Airlines to interact online with their customers, employees and partners.
Vignette is committed to provide integrated content management applications that allow organizations to build lasting relationships with their customers. Achieving this goal requires applications that can:
- Communicate—Communicate to customers in a personalized way with the appropriate content, delivering a superior customer experience by providing the right information, at the right time, to the right audience.;
- Collaborate—Provide a complete end-to-end solution that integrates with existing front-end and back-end applications and legacy systems, applications from business partners and relevant marketplaces.;
- Comprehend—Understand customer requirements and needs by gathering information to allow you to gain actionable insight into customer application usage and preferences.;
A Comprehensive Content Management Engine
Content is the substance of every Internet application. Content comprises the sum total of a site visitor's experience, and how effectively a company manages its content has a direct impact on bottom-line cost, top-line revenue and customer retention, making content the currency for competing in this digital age.
The content management engine in Vignette® Content Suite V6 allows non-technical content contributors to submit, edit, review and approve content using their favorite tools; manages content from databases, file systems, news feeds, legacy systems and other sources; characterizes and enriches content with flexible metadata that puts the content in context and drives personalization and knowledge management; provides participants a simple to-do list interface for completing tasks; and defines workflow processes with e-mail notifications to manage the collective efforts of your team. It also keeps a full approval history to help ensure quality and accountability, schedules launch and expiration of content and applications and reliably manages content in almost any language or character set. It manages content separate from its presentation, so that it can be repurposed to serve a variety of devices and electronic touch points and optimizes the delivery of content, with integrated cache and component-management capabilities.
The content management engine of Vignette Content Suite V6 stores and manages content directly in standard, extensible, relational databases. Relational databases are proven in the industry for scaling and providing the scalability, for instance, as it relates to query. It manages content in synch with dynamic applications, and there is no need for any intermediate proprietary repository. It provides real-time integration between Vignette's page-component cache and content-rich applications, and seamless integration with both legacy document-management systems and flat-file content structures.
In the world of customer-driven, personalized Internet applications, the more "content aware" an application is, the better able it is to provide a relevant, efficient and satisfying experience to the end-customer. Personalized applications that know their content and their customers well are more equipped to deliver the right content to the right customer in the right way at the right time.
Through the power of open and scalable relational database technology, the Vignette content management engine provides the ability for non-technical content owners to characterize and categorize content by attaching as much descriptive "metadata" as they require. A metadata record consists of a number of pre-defined elements representing specific attributes of a resource, and each element can have one or more values. Consider these two additional descriptions of metadata, from the same source: "Metadata is a systematic method for describing resources and thereby improving access to them," and, "Metadata provides the essential link between the information creator and the information user."
The production-center tool of the Vignette content management engine includes a visual interface that allows business users to characterize content. This capability is also available through the Windows Explorer interface and through the browser-based content management applications that can be quickly created and tailored to users' needs. Developing a consistent set of re-usable content metadata promotes efficiency within an organization and improves the quality and accessibility of information.
Please contact Vignette North America at 512 741 4300, Vignette Europe/United Kingdom at 44 (0) 162 877 2000, Vignette Australia at 61 2 9455 5000, or Vignette Singapore at 65 334 9948.
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