Selling Vignette 7.5

I’ve noticed an interesting change in the way Vignette has been pitching 7.5, in particular the High Performance Delivery (HPD) module.

At Vignette Village 2007, I recall that HPD was pitched as the core of “hyper-personalization” of Web content. The presentations pushed the idea that with enough nodes and arrows and licenses, Vignette could help us deliver custom content to each user while maintaining the same astonishing level of performance we had come to expect. I suspect this was an answer to a problem that most attendees didn’t realize they had.

Even as late as March, Vignette still emphasized the personalization and customization aspects of HPD:

“Our Web Experience Platform is all about customising and personalising the web experience, but many firms are afraid that this might make their sites suffer from slower performances,” he said. “HPD allows customers to offer the richest and freshest experience and helps contain IT costs.”

By launch time Vignette was already singing a different tune.

Vignette created HPD to help enable its customers to significantly increase the overall page complexity and volumes without the corresponding increase in resources required to deliver such pages. … Vignette recognized that most sites its customers built were content-heavy sites. Even sites that customers built to support application delivery drifted toward static content and documents. …

HPD’s innovative solution helps address … ability to control costs … improved site response times … delivery of cached pages during planned or unplanned application server down time.

Hmmm, cost control and response time. Now those are the problems I wanted to see addressed

In my limited experience, Vignette core developers and VPS consultants have never been in denial about the shortcomings of the company’s products. I’m glad to see a growing sense of reality make its way into the marketing department.

Things I like about Vignette V7

Since V7 was/is/will be the point of reference for my evaluations of other content management systems, here are a few things I do like about Vignette:

• Easy to create new content type definitions
• Extensive APIs for importing and exporting content
• Strong drinks at Vignette Village

Things I don’t like?

• Slow, especially on the content delivery side. Critical API calls seem to execute in geologic time.
• Dubiously extensible: for example, each new input widget has to be deployed as a separate webapp.
• Dubiously scalable: practical limit on the number of content items in a single repository seems to be disappointingly small.
• Documentation stinks.
• Poor integration between VAP, VCM, and DPM.

Don’t get me wrong: I do think that Vignette has its niche. But I’m not the only user to conclude that V7 is the solution for someone else’s problem.