White Paper

June 2006

Vignette Collaboration
®

Tailored to your Needs

Vignette Collaboration

Table of Contents
Executive Summary................................................................... 1
Today’s Business Challenges....................................................... 2
Getting Closer to Customers ................................................... 2
Retaining Profitable Customers................................................. 2
Aligning and Evolving with Changing Processes........................ 2
Meeting Compliance and Record Keeping Mandates................. 3
Capturing Knowledge from Retiring Employees......................... 3
Finding the Experts................................................................. 3
Accessing and Utilizing Information from Applications............... 3
Managing Knowledge .............................................................. 4
Data, Metadata, Information and Knowledge............................ 4
Unstructured Knowledge is the Key.......................................... 4
Enterprise Collaboration – Improving Knowledge Management...... 4
The New Extended Enterprise.................................................. 4
Collaboration and KM: A Symbiotic Relationship....................... 5
Key Considerations for a Successful Collaboration Solution............ 6
Vignette Collaboration............................................................... 6
Collaborative Workspaces ..................................................... 7
Collaborative Business Processes............................................... 10
Workflow............................................................................ 10
Desktop Integration.............................................................. 11
Search and Query............................................................... 11
Knowledge Agents............................................................... 12
E-mail Integration................................................................. 13
Participate in Threaded Discussions........................................ 14
Capture Correspondence in Folders....................................... 14
Contribute Documents to Shared Workspaces.......................... 15
Publish Call Reports or Other Typical Form Data...................... 15
Maintain URLS and Links....................................................... 15
Participate in Document Approvals......................................... 16
Receive Workflow Prompts.................................................... 16
E-mail Management, Compatibility, and Security..................... 16
E-mail Address Management................................................. 17
E-mail Compatibility and Security........................................... 17
E-mail Handling: Vignette Collaboration Advantages................ 18
Vignette Collaboration C-mail Services................................... 19
Document and Content Management..................................... 19
Productivity Tools................................................................. 20
Support for Multiple Languages............................................. 21
Web Services and Standards................................................ 21
Comprehensive Security Model............................................. 22
Integration with Other Vignette Products................................. 22
Collaborative Solutions............................................................ 23
Vignette Strategic Account Management................................. 23
Vignette Project Delivery....................................................... 24
A Collaborative Framework...................................................... 25
Integration with CRM Applications......................................... 25
Portal-Ready Solutions.......................................................... 26
Rich Development Environment.............................................. 27
High Availability.................................................................. 29
Open Architecture............................................................... 29
Summary............................................................................... 30
Vignette Collaboration
Executive Summary
Though times have changed, your primary business
drivers probably haven’t: profitability, productivity and
providing value for customers. Over the last decade, due
in part to continuing technological advances, customer
expectations have risen and new products and services
are brought to market at an ever-increasing pace.
Satisfying customers and producing quality products no
longer guarantees success‑—you must also react quickly
to changing market conditions and anticipate customer
needs. In order to be successful, companies must realize
two key elements for achieving success: efficient use of
existing resources and leveraging business relationships.
A new model for more efficiently conducting business,
called enterprise collaboration involves the use of
technology, processes and corporate intelligence to
effectively collaborate and share knowledge across the
extended enterprise. Collaboration is critical to
increasing customer loyalty and driving profits from
strategic customer relationships in service industries such
as professional services, marketing, and financial
services. Collaboration is also essential to driving
profitability and competitive differentiation in fast-moving
industries such as technology, telecommunications and
large-scale manufacturing. While collaboration once
occurred largely in meetings or around the water cooler,
today’s companies face the daunting task of facilitating
collaboration across geographic boundaries with people
inside and outside your organization such as customers,
suppliers, and partners.
A large portion of your company’s knowledge is
unstructured, residing in e-mail, on desktops, in
documents and on Web pages. Maximizing the value of
unstructured knowledge is essential to realizing the
potential of enterprise collaboration; capturing day-to-
day interactions and utilizing their value across your
organization is the missing link.
Prior attempts to bridge the gaps between unstructured
information sources focused on publishing and accessing
data already captured by structured processes. Vignette

Collaboration is a robust and secure enterprise
collaboration solution that improves sharing and teaming
across your enterprise; and supports customer
satisfaction by not only capturing best practices and
corporate knowledge, but leveraging that knowledge to
accelerate responses to customer requests, proposals,
resolutions and new ideas. In addition, Vignette
Collaboration is fast and easy to integrate with common
solutions such as portals, document and content
management systems, and project management tools.
These individual solutions, when combined with Vignette
Collaboration, provide the depth and breadth of
functionality required to effectively leverage unstructured
knowledge. Most organizations share documents and
related information with co-workers and partners using
e-mail attachments, which are neither manageable nor
secure. And though groupware-based applications are
common and well adopted, adding collaborative
features to these types of process-specific applications
often results in “stovepipes” of collaboration. Vignette
Collaboration is part of a fully integrated Enterprise
Content Management (ECM) platform by Vignette which
fully supports the entire information value-chain—from
collaborative creation to document and records
management, imaging and workflow, and personalized
targeted delivery within and outside your firewall.
Businesses today want to strengthen relationships, drive
productivity, and increase communication among
employees, partners, and customers. To do this, you
need a solution that can serve as the foundation for all
knowledge sharing and storage; tying together
unstructured and process-specific knowledge in an
environment where people can truly collaborate across
the breadth of the extended organization. You need a
solution with a scalable infrastructure tightly integrated
with existing business applications: a true collaboration
solution that transparently and securely ties people on
the outside to the resources on the inside. You need
Vignette Collaboration.
Vignette Collaboration enables people to:
• Create, gather, and manage unstructured knowledge,
including e-mail and Web-based information.
Vignette Collaboration
• Work together and communicate on large, distributed,
cross-organizational teams, across distance, time
zones and organizational boundaries.
• Discuss, analyze, review, and approve information
collaboratively.
• Discover, learn from, reuse and contribute to the
knowledge of the extended organization.
• Develop and sustain relationships with colleagues,
partners and customers.
• Access information and documents stored in Vignette
Collaboration easily and remotely, via e-mail and
Web clients.
• Search in native languages for expertise and
information.
Perhaps most importantly of all, Vignette Collaboration
works the way people work. Vignette Collaboration
features fit tightly with existing work practices so that
people can actually use them.
Vignette Collaboration is part of an integrated ECM
family of products that can help organizations grow their
business, increase productivity, reduce costs, manage
risk and improve interactions with key constituents.
Vignette’s ECM family of products allows organizations
to manage the complete information lifecycle to optimize
business processes, share information,, integrate with
applications, personalize delivery of global applications
through multiple channels or devices, and control
documents and records. Using Vignette, organizations
can leverage their records, documents, Web pages,
images, e-mails, multimedia, Web transactions, faxes,
database records and other unstructured content to
create new opportunities, expand profits and realize
greater savings and efficiencies.
Today’s Business Challenges
Technology and globalization have revolutionized the
nature of business relationships, and the rapid pace of
innovation can literally turn today’s great

accomplishments into tomorrow’s old news. Through all
this, one thing is constant: to be successful, you must be
responsive to the needs of your customers, which
requires being responsive to changes in the market.
Getting Closer to Customers
Although technological advances enable you to reach
customers halfway around the world, customers only
reward companies that are able to establish relationships
with them., Global customers demand that you as a
vendor provide consistent, personalized service levels
across geographies and business units.
In addition, you face the challenge of providing
personalized experiences to an increasingly diverse
customer base. Without more effective management and
warehousing of the insights from interactions with
customers, partners, suppliers and employees, you will
not effectively meet the needs of your customers.
Furthermore, while you prospect across geographies,
your competitors do the same. This competition heightens
the need to establish and maintain solid relationships.
Retaining Profitable Customers
Your existing customers typically represent the greatest
opportunity for consistent growth and profitability. Those
customers also represent your company’s revenue base—
lose those customers and your revenue base erodes.
Manage the customer in a way that doesn’t maximize
earnings and your base of profitability erodes. The
challenge is to enable your customer-facing employees
with the applications, infrastructure, and information to
best serve the right customers.
Aligning and Evolving with Changing Processes
Continuing advances in technology and the growing
impact of globalization are two forces changing the
basics of how people work. More than ever, you and
your colleagues work in extended business-to-business
communities that include consultants, partners, suppliers,
customers, and employees from all over the world. Your
business processes must now continue to function across
Vignette Collaboration
geographies—and multiple constituents, as well
Companies must dramatically change how they
collaborate in order to continue to work effectively.
Vignette Collaboration can produce cost savings for
your organization by streamlining business processes
and collaboration.
Meeting Compliance and Record Keeping Mandates
If your organization must comply with governmental
regulations, process can mean the difference between
success and failure. To avoid stiff fines, punitive
sanctions and possible bad press, you must comply and
you must be able to prove it. Whether it’s regulations
stipulated in the United States by the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), or the
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA); or whether it’s
Basel II in Europe, compliance can add significant
complexity to your operations—and add significantly to
operational costs.
Enterprise collaboration integrated with a records
management system can help you minimize the increase
in operational costs. But to succeed, records need to be
captured from the collaboration solution as a natural
outcome of user actions and processes. Since traditional
records management systems are designed for records
managers and not for information workers, their user
interfaces are tend to be complex and cumbersome.
Enterprise collaboration not only provides a better user
interface, it can also automate records management tasks
so that they are transparent to the information workers.
Vignette is uniquely positioned to provide the best of
both worlds by providing an integrated solution that
includes enterprise collaboration as well as records
management. For more information on the Vignette
Collaborative Record and Document Management
Solution, please visit http://www.vignette.com.
Capturing Knowledge from Retiring Employees
There are costs associated with employee turnover:
finding a suitable replacement, training the new hire,
decreased learning-curve productivity, and more. Even
after assuming these costs, the new hire will not have all

of the departing employee’s experience and unstructured
knowledge. Your organization must spend additional
time, and perhaps customer relationship capital, to
completely train the new worker. And the pressures of
employee turnover don’t stop there, because the
consequent loss of unstructured knowledge with each
departing worker adds another cost to your business.
Finding the Experts
Organizations that seek to reduce call times and respond
more quickly to questions often seek to leverage their
experts or best practices and find ways to spread their
knowledge. The larger the organization or the greater
number of services and products, the greater likelihood
that “expertise” and best practices are often held in silos
or with few individuals. However, you can quickly
resolve urgent customer problems if you know the name
of the expert. But, too often, even if you knew the name,
the ‘expert’ is likely to reside in a different country and
time zone which add to the delays and threatens
customer satisfaction. To find best practices or experts
within your organization you need to be able to find and
share the information.
Accessing and Utilizing Information from Applications
As your organization grows and diversifies, your
employees must utilize an increasing number of business
applications, while addressing the need for more
efficient personal communication with partners, suppliers
and customers. These varied business applications lead
to an increasing number of “stovepipes”, or “silos,” of
stored information. Important information might be
located in an e-mail, spreadsheet, on an Intranet site, on
a jotted note or sitting on someone’s hard drive. Ensuring
the right people have access to the right information in
the right form at the right time can create a seemingly
impossible challenge. The silos must be restructured. In
addition, new technology constantly arrives through your
organization as Internet standards like Web interfaces,
Java and Web Services are applied to internal systems.
These new technological approaches require you to have
a strategy to keep existing applications relevant to the
growing extended organization.
Vignette Collaboration
Managing Knowledge
Data, Metadata, Information and Knowledge
A discussion of business knowledge first requires a
review of some key terms: data, metadata, information
and knowledge. Data are the bits and bytes, the basic
raw material of the information age. Metadata are data
about data: who contributed given data when, in what
format, and any associated attributes of that data.
Information is data made meaningful through this meta-
data with added context, and summary.
Data Information Knowledge
Meta-data, Values,
experience,
context,
summary insight
Figure 1. Data, Metadata, Information, Knowledge
Knowledge is broader and deeper than information and
data. Knowledge is a mix of values, experience, and
insight that provides a framework for evaluating and
incorporating new experiences and information. While
these characteristics make knowledge valuable, they also
make it more difficult to manage.
Unstructured Knowledge is the Key
Successful knowledge management requires enabling,
managing and reusing the qualitative information and
relationships that enabled those interactions. Every
interaction, or transaction has, on average, a history of
15 to 20 multiple collaborative events that led up to it.

Without that unstructured history, information about the
transaction fails to fully describe it. With that history,
information becomes knowledge.
Clearly, knowledge management (done properly) brings
enormous benefits: you realize the importance of
managing knowledge to meet business challenges. In
fact, second-generation Knowledge Management will
only grow because today your company’s value centers
on its intangibles: competencies, relationships and
knowledge, particularly the unstructured kind. Good
Knowledge Management technologies capture these
intangibles and provide a context for their application
and preservation within your business environment; a
process that not only strengthens organizational
competitiveness and long-term growth potential, it builds
company value.
Enterprise Collaboration—
Tailored to Your Business Needs
The New Extended Enterprise
Today’s product and service companies work across
departments, time zones and organizational
boundaries. Hidden inside the term “extended
enterprise” is the reality that in this new age of business,
companies have become inter-dependent, working
together in a dynamic environment where survival
depends on the quality and breadth of alliances. A
successful modern business has no visible seams
between “internal” and “external” resources.
More than just transactions, business means trust,
relationships and delivering long-term, sustained value.
Companies have long established that building and
nurturing customer relationships creates value. In order to
maximize their return on relationships, companies seek
ways to drive additional revenues and profits from those
relationships. More than customer relationships,
companies now realize the necessity and potential value
of nurturing enterprise alliances as well.
Vignette Collaboration
Collaboration and Knowledge Management:
A Symbiotic Relationship
How can you deliver goods and services with greater
speed, consistency and quality? How can you tap into
and leverage the combined intellectual capital of your
employees, customers and partners? The answer is
collaboration.
In practical terms, enterprise collaboration consists of
three primary elements:
• Coordination – Managing basic logistics behind any
business process or activity, the order and direction of
steps in a shared task
• Efficiency – Avoiding redundancy through coordination
and consolidation
• Synergy – Sharing knowledge for innovation: the
optimal state of collaboration
When applied to the extended enterprise, coordination,
efficiency and synergy create immense value, enabling
more effective use of your resources. This leads to cost
savings, revenue generation, and additional value for
your customers.
Enterprise collaboration serves as a foundation for all
information sharing, tying together unstructured and
structured knowledge in an environment where people
work together, learn from each other and integrate
information from the larger enterprise. Enterprise
collaboration supports applications that integrate the
people-to-people activities of customer relations
management (CRM) Supply Chain Management (SCM),
and Business Process Management (BPM). More than
groupware or point solutions, enterprise collaboration
truly offers you the opportunity to tap into the collective
expertise of your organization, regardless of
organizational, geographic, or time boundaries.
Crossing such boundaries is no small matter. People can
get online from virtually anywhere, but if they want to do
collaborative work outside the corporate perimeter they
typically either sacrifice functionality or manage

cumbersome security challenges. Enterprise collaboration
helps move beyond such issues to anywhere, anytime
collaboration.
In effect, enterprise collaboration works the way people
work, creating a solution to fit the enterprise, instead of
conforming the enterprise to the solution. Enterprise
collaboration utilizes common personal work functions
and tools to create a seamless collaborative environment,
one which easily captures knowledge as it is created
and increases the value of that knowledge on every
reuse, creating an upward-spiraling loop of constantly
enriched, refined and integrated knowledge.
Customers
Best Practices
Ef f
y
erg
icie
Enterprise Portals
Syn
ncy
Business Intelligence
Project Management
Customer Relationship
Management
Supply Chain Management
Partners Coordination Suppliers
Figure 2. Enterprise Collaboration Model
An enterprise collaboration solution provides
the following:
• Collaborative workspaces – In the business context,
people collaborate to make decisions, solve problems
and review progress. Collaborative workspaces enable
such collaboration over time, space and organizational
boundaries. Because every business and every
business situation has unique needs, workspaces must
be highly configurable and configurable by users,
making workspace implementation timely and with
reduced administrative burdens.
Vignette Collaboration
• Seamless desktop integration – Employees spend
considerable time working in desktop applications,
which capture, store and process information. The
drawback is that these applications create
information silos on each worker’s computer. By
integrating with desktop applications, enterprise
collaboration removes this barrier and helps workers
share and find information.
• Rich e-mail integration – E-mail serves as the
ubiquitous communication solution today and is the
most universally deployed and heavily used
application on the desktop. E-mail is easy to use, thus
employees are comfortable with it. A true enterprise
collaboration solution must leverage the use of e-mail
without disrupting the typical uses of this powerful
communication tool.
• Integration with enterprise applications – An enterprise
collaboration solution must enable the collaborative
processes to share data with existing business
applications, fit the collaborative processes into the
enterprise infrastructure and be flexible enough to
adapt to future changes in the business environment.
• Comprehensive support for the mobile worker – An
enterprise collaboration solution must support the
existing work habits of all workers, including those that
aren’t always bound to a desk. The solution must
ensure that these mobile workers are able to engage
in core collaborative processes through e-mail
(including offline) and e-mail-enabled mobile devices.
• Expert identification – Large global organizations can
benefit by finding the experts within their organization.
Enterprise collaboration helps identify individuals via
robust search capabilities that have proven expertise
on specific issues.
• Enterprise strength – Organizations that value
information, quickly find that collaborative environments
grow from sharing knowledge and require that the
collaboration environment scales to store the millions of
objects for both storage and search.

Key Considerations for a Successful
Collaboration Solution
Many collaboration solutions exist on the market today,
so it is important that you find a flexible solution that has
the capabilities required to meet your specific business
needs. Some collaboration solutions only offer rigid,
“one size fits all” workspaces that cannot be easily
adapted to your specific business needs. When selecting
a collaboration solution, be sure to thoroughly investigate
the solution’s ability to meet your specific business
requirements. Capabilities such as templates, out-of-the-
box process support, and roles-based security provide a
flexible basis for building a collaboration solution
tailored to your business.
In addition to a flexible foundation, the collaboration
solution should offer out-of-the-box integration with
desktop productivity applications and e-mail. Solutions
that require special server configurations and/or client-
side software installations in order to integrate with
desktop applications have a higher cost of ownership.
This higher cost comes from the additional time and
resources required to launch and maintain the solution.
In order to realize the highest return on your investment,
you should choose a collaboration solution that offers
maximum scalability, modularity, and easy integration
with other applications. Collaboration solutions that
depend on loosely integrated technologies from different
vendors will not allow you easily adapt your solution as
your needs change. To protect your investment and allow
for the highest returns, consider a collaboration solution
that natively integrates with records and document
management, portals, and content management.
Vignette Collaboration
Vignette Collaboration was built on the philosophy that
the best way to address enterprise collaboration is to
build a Web-based, collaborative workspace inside an
existing application environment that reaches the entire
extended enterprise. Such a solution should act as an
Vignette Collaboration
enterprise knowledge source, facilitate many-to-many
collaboration, and in turn generate greater value as it
integrates, manages and—through reuse—constantly
increases the value of your intellectual capital.
Although today most people in your organization
collaborate and communicate, they most often do so
through ad-hoc processes using single-purpose
applications such as e-mail and productivity applications.
While these forms of communication and collaboration
seem to satisfy the immediate need, they lack the
capacity to capture information and knowledge for later
use. As an example, consider how easily documents and
e-mails can be lost, whether due to system failure,
organizational changes, the end of a partnership or an
individual’s departure from your organization. Vignette
Collaboration offers you the ability to replace the ad-hoc
methods in use today with out-of-the-box, shared online
workspaces that capture the critical information and
intellectual property shared through e-mail and
productivity applications so that the information and
intellectual property can be leveraged and re-used when
appropriate. By replacing these ad-hoc methods and
informal processes with online workspaces, employees in
your organization gain the benefits of access to the
information in the workspace without adversely changing
the way they work on a daily basis. Specific capabilities
of Vignette Collaboration enable:
• Increased team communication, efficiency and
productivity with workspace features such as powerful
search and index functionality, rich subscription and
notification capabilities, and robust security and
access control for improved knowledge sharing.
• Improved ability for non-technical users to quickly
create shared secure, online workspaces to deliver
dashboard views, subscriptions and notifications to
keep team members up-to-date on revised items.
• Combined full-text search and relational query
capabilities to present information in the right business
context, and utilizes knowledge agents that make
Vignette Collaboration invaluable for leveraging
corporate knowledge to complete work faster and
more efficiently.

• Quickly access or tailor business processes for the
organization to include: check-in and checkout
content, collaborate on issues, comment on documents
and participate in approval workflows directly through
tight e-mail integration.
• Quickly identify subject matter experts through skills-
based, topical, or text searches on information
contained within the workspaces.
• Exceed the demands of the entire organization for
sharing documents and best practices, as well as the
growth of the applications by supporting millions of
objects to store, search and find.
Collaborative Workspaces
Collaborative workspaces are digital environments
created by workers that bring together projects,
processes and people—from disparate groups including
employees, customers, suppliers and partners. They may
be thought of as secure spaces where employees work
seamlessly with partners, customers, prospective
customers, or any other audience, thereby creating a
more productive, efficient and agile enterprise. In a
collaborative workspace, documents, e-mail, Web
pages, or any other information objects can be
organized, preserved, published, shared and retrieved
for later reuse.
Collaborative workspaces can be as simple as folders,
or as rich as task-specific work environments drawn from
a library of predefined collaboration models, such as
project spaces and customer Extranets. These special
workspaces can contain custom content such as best
practices and template documents, and have custom
appearances, such as a customer Extranet co-branded
with customer and vendor logos. Workspaces can have
individualized security policies that allow groups of
people with different roles from multiple organizations to
safely work together. Also, workspaces can have custom
workflow interfaces, designed to support specific work
practices such as managing projects, completing a
proposal, or managing customer support.
Vignette Collaboration
Discover, Contribute, Share
Discuss, Keep Informed
Vignette Collaboration Solutions
Figure 3. Fundamental Collaborative Activities
In addition, each user has access to a personal page
where he or she can launch private workspaces to
capture information only they can access. Personal
pages provide you with access to your notifications, as
well as a public area and a private area. You can link
workspaces you use frequently to your personal page
for easy access and also receive notifications of changes
to information. You also can establish group links to
publish information to teams, groups and cross-enterprise
communities using e-mail or uploads directly to selected
workspaces. Personal workspaces are important to a
collaboration environment because people often work on
tasks, processes or documents, for example, alone and
then selectively share the materials with others. Personal
workspaces afford you the full benefits of working online,
while eliminating the issue of having to switch tools or
duplicate files to share information.
Figure 4. Personal workspace

In personal workspaces, users decide which access
policies are appropriate for their own content. Within the
same workspace, for instance, a user can place
Disseminate, Re-Use
documents for owner use only, selectively publish some
but not all documents, allow some people to jointly edit
some documents but not others, and so forth. In large-
scale cross-organizational collaboration, people can
preserve the original context of content by selectively
allowing others to see or manipulate it.
Commenting on shared information is a common form of
collaboration; such as e-mails that contain attachments or
pointers to information with commentary about why the
information merits attention. Vignette Collaboration
makes commenting a structured way to talk about
information. Comments can be quick one-liners, akin to
yellow sticky notes, or full-blown memos with attached
documents. Like e-mail, comments can form
conversational threads of replies. Unlike e-mail, however,
Vignette Collaboration comments are linked with, but not
part of, the referenced information.
Referenced information can be a document stored in
Vignette Collaboration, or a Web link hosted on another
Web server represented in the workspace as a Web
document. Vignette Collaboration stores only one copy
of the referenced information, with its context visible from
the comment. This collaboration around shared content,
as opposed to collaboration around institutionalized
conversations, spares the creation of the all-too-common
blanket e-mails that go unread.
Commenting also serves as a powerful end-user
technique for creating and capturing metadata about
shared information. A user can comment on a particular
piece of information’s relevance and quality by marking
it with an attribute such as “highly recommended.” By
using such conventions in the text of comments, end
users can invent and maintain their own collaborative
review processes without programming databases,
designing forms, programming workflow or special
purpose applications.
Vignette Collaboration also manages multiple
conversations about the same information. Collaboration
comments have a unique and particularly useful
Vignette Collaboration
capability for collaborative review of content such as
documents or Web pages. Comments are situated in
context, represented by workspaces in the group
memory. Since Vignette Collaboration objects can have
multiple contexts, there can be a different stream of
independent commentary in each folder in which a
document appears. This allows, for example,
engineering and marketing to add their distinct
perspectives to the same specification document. With
access control, these multiple conversations can be kept
private while the document discussed remains public.
Figure 5. Document with Comments
Using branded Extranet workspaces – Business platforms
typically do not allow external users access to
information inside the firewall, which greatly complicates
collaborative efforts for an extended organization. Such
limitations force partners in a given project to use such
lesser tools as group e-mails with attachments, faxes, or
snail mail to do what could take a fraction of the time if
all parties were behind the firewall.
Vignette Collaboration enables your organization to
extend the power of collaborative workspaces to your
customers and to members of your extended
organization with full object-level access control, which
greatly facilitates collaboration between persons on
different sides of the firewall. In addition, Vignette
Collaboration provides considerable flexibility in
tailoring the user interface. When a customer sees their
brand in the workspace, it serves to reinforce both

companies’ commitment to success, and in turn builds
confidence that furthers the relationship.
• Co-branded workspaces – Design familiarity leverages
branding across workspaces. Because Vignette’s
collaborative workspaces can be readily adapted to
match corporate branding elements, customers,
suppliers, and partners each find a familiar look and
feel when using the workspaces.
• Solutions are adopted and used – Vignette
Collaboration provides a solution for your specific
needs and background, which reduces the learning
curve and raises the adoption rate. Furthermore, the
Vignette Collaboration collaborative Extranet
capability allows you to make simple changes, allows
for the addition of rich new object types that map to
specific business processes, and integrates workflow
with other applications. All this helps ensure that the
workspace becomes a place to work together, not just
a reporting site.
• Secure Extranet deployment – Extranet security
requires rigorous content access control and a secure
deployment model. With regard to access control,
Vignette Collaboration employs a robust and reliable
security model.. Secure deployment requires a robust
multi-tier operating environment. Vignette
Collaboration runs on proven operating systems and
supports most enterprise-class databases.
• Economical scalability –
Internet
Because of the security
features inherent in Vignette
Collaboration, many
collaborative Extranet
Web Server
workspaces can be deployed
on a single server, thus
Vignette reducing cost of ownership
Collaboration and improving your return
Server
on investment.
Intranet Figure 6. Vignette Collaboration in
the Extranet
Vignette Collaboration
Collaborative Business Processes
Successful collaborative workspaces will model specific
business processes. Instead of providing generic, “one-
size-fits-all” workspaces, Vignette Collaboration provides
the ability to easily create workspaces that map directly
to your specific process. In order to create these
workspaces, you select the appropriate components
(document libraries, discussions, dashboards, tasks,
calendars, etc) and then model your process within
those components.
As an example, consider how your organization
manages the flow of your Sales deals. Deal flow
management is complex in that it requires you to
manage financial data, documents, and other content
from idea through proposal and commitment to closure.
Many of your deals are complex—they involve multiple
functional groups (sales teams, legal, finance, etc.) and
can even involve multiple lines of business. These deals
are labor intensive since they require extensive, detailed
documentation and significant amounts of
communication. How many systems do you use today to
manage the flow of your deals?
By creating deal flow workspaces using Vignette
Collaboration, you can centralize and capture all of your
documentation and communication in one central
repository. This makes it possible for you to improve
efficiency by reducing your costs, improving team
productivity, leveraging skills and experiences, and
reducing the ramp-up time for deal teams. Additionally,
you can increase management visibility by providing
easy access to deal status, forecast roll-ups, and reports
on overall account relationship health.
As another example, consider how your Sales teams
manage the process of responding to RFP’s. It is common
for Sales teams to work together on RFP responses by e-
mailing versions of the response document back and
forth through an ad-hoc process. This is an inefficient
way to create an RFP response since the information
becomes distributed and cannot be easily re-used for
future responses. More importantly, this method of
10
creating responses is risky. How often do individuals
suffer hardware failures? How easy is it to become
confused to the point of mixing up document versions
and overwriting other’s work?
By using collaborative workspaces to manage the
process of creating RFP responses, you gain an ever-
growing repository of information that you can use for
future RFP responses. Since the workspaces capture and
manage all of the different document versions, you don’t
have to worry about losing valuable information. Your
teams working on the responses continue to use their
desktop applications and e-mail to complete the work,
while the collaborative workspace captures all of the
information. The entire process of creating RFP
responses is greatly simplified since the response
workspaces route the documents to each individual
through an organized process.
Workflow
Workflows are critical components for creating
workspaces that map to your specific business processes.
Vignette Collaboration provides you with a “configure-
and-go” approach for modeling collaborative business
processes. These processes can be simple, linear
processes for document approval, or complex processes
for coordinating the execution of your Sales deals. With
the easy to use process designer included with Vignette
Collaboration, you can easily model virtually any
business process. Additionally, you can apply the
workflows you design to documents, to folders, or to
entire workspaces.
Workflows created within Vignette Collaboration route
items to stages based on pre-defined actions and rules
that you establish. You can include notifications (either
via e-mail or through the workspaces) to inform people of
a required action, or to keep them current on the
ongoing progress. You can also use notifications to send
out warnings or escalations based on upcoming or
missed deadlines. And of course Vignette Collaboration
tracks every action so that you have the ability to audit
full processes and specific tasks.
Vignette Collaboration 11

You can model cross-departmental processes by creating Search and Query

nested workflows (workflows within workflows), and you
A knowledge management solution must address the
can apply access policies to workflows in order to secure
function of finding specific information. Vignette
who can contribute to a workflow or to a workflow
Collaboration includes a powerful search mechanism for
stage. You can also use access policies to secure who
locating information from anywhere in the group memory
can act on or route an item to a destination for a
and displaying it in the context in which it was previously
workflow stage, and to secure what items users can see
relevant. Full-text indexing of all metadata and over 200
within a workflow.
binary data types allows retrieval by textual content,
Desktop Integration custom metadata, information type, author, date or
location in the group memory. Vignette combines a high
One of the key capabilities of an enterprise collaboration
performance commercial information retrieval engine
solution is the ability to add collaborative benefits
with proprietary query preprocessing that optimizes for
without requiring users to change the way they work. By
the kinds of queries performed in a collaborative,
integrating with common desktop productivity
knowledge reuse environment. Vignette Collaboration is
applications, Vignette Collaboration makes it simple for
unique in its handling of metadata: it seamlessly
you to share information with others while still working
combines relational queries, such as “find all objects of
with your preferred desktop applications. You can edit
type ‘white paper’ with attribute ‘completed in the past
documents in their native applications directly from
six months’” and information retrieval queries, such as
within a workspace by simply clicking on the document
“find all documents containing the name ‘John Doe’ and
name. Once you have finished editing the document, all
the noun phrase ‘sales opportunity.’”
you have to do is save the file as you normally would.
Once saved, the new version of the document is In the following example, “Get all ‘proposals’ from
available in the workspace. ‘accounts’ in ‘west’ that reference the product ‘xyz;’ the
proposal is a specific document type, calling it out will
Vignette Collaboration also provides WebDAV
eliminate potential false hits that are from marketing
integration so that you can view the contents of your
material. ‘Accounts’ further reduces the list to existing
workspaces through Microsoft Windows Explorer views.
customers; ‘west’ limits the geography and ‘with
This integration enables drag-and-drop capabilities so
reference to ‘product xyz’ is a full text query across the
that you can easily move documents and files into and
entire proposal which insures that more than just titles,
out of your workspaces. Each workspace that you “view
summaries and system meta-data is searched.
as a Web folder” becomes a shortcut in your “My
Network Places” folder in Microsoft Windows. Using Vignette Collaboration also provides a flexible user
these shortcuts, you can also save new documents into interface for query specification, result list presentation,
workspaces directly from your preferred applications. and query reformulation, allowing each aspect of the
search to be customized. You can create custom query
Vignette Collaboration also provides native instant
forms for different kinds of searches, for example: find a
messaging integration. Through this connection to
document known to exist, find an expert by what they
Microsoft Live Communications Server, synchronous
have written, find a prior proposal in a given area, or
collaboration features are available directly within your
find a best practice. You can view the search results
workspaces. You can launch instant messaging sessions
within context, which is powerful for determining
with members of your workspace using the presence
relevance, or you can create custom “reports” that show
icons that are displayed in the workspace. Each icon lets
the search results as rows and columns of objects and
know whether or not an individual is online and
their attributes.
available for a chat.
Vignette Collaboration
Figure 7. Collaboration Advanced Search Form
Persistent queries – Few people use the search feature to
its full potential, generally because most have not
learned the best ways to use it to solve their business
needs. Even developing a specific search query can be
an exploratory process. Fortunately, Vignette
Collaboration can make the knowledge developed in
such processes available for sharing and reuse. Once a
user has achieved the desired results from a query, he or
she can save the search query, thus making it persistent
and thereby creating a folder whose contents are those
items that match the query. The persistent search object
can then be named “How to find out what we know
about customer X,” put in other folders, shared with
others, and even commented on as if it were any other
information source. When combined with customized
result-list formatting, the persistent search capability is to
the world of unstructured data what enterprise report
generation interfaces are to structured data.
Knowledge Agents
In any large organization, it is impossible to monitor
every conversation, check every information source, and
keep track of every project. Furthermore, in many
collaborative situations, the user cannot know whom to
keep informed. Vignette Collaboration overcomes these
problems by offering knowledge agents—subscribing to
a saved search. As you collect, create or discuss
12
information, agents can be triggered to inform you or
others who are interested in the content. The originators
need not anticipate the information needs of others and
the information seekers don’t have to know whom to ask.
Subscription is a general information-processing concept
that has been applied to a variety of information types
under various marketing concepts such as “personal
Web pages,” “push,” and “search agents.” Subscription
is essentially a service that delivers a stream of
information to fulfill an information need as stated by the
subscriber. Stock quote services, news clipping services
and subscription to public e-mail distribution lists are
familiar examples of subscription services.
Vignette Collaboration provides a subscription service
that delivers subscriptions for all types of information in
the shared environment. The unique power of
subscriptions is the precision by which you can indicate
interest and completeness across all information sources.
For each kind of information object, there is an
appropriate subscription service with special benefits:
• Subscription to workspaces – To keep informed of the
collaborative activities in a project, you can subscribe
to the project’s folder. When any document in that
folder is uploaded or collected, Vignette Collaboration
informs you of what happened, when and by whom.
When combined with subscriptions, folders become
collaborative workflow “in-baskets.” For example,
when the deliverable document is ready, a user can
place it in a “Deliverables” folder. Parties interested in
the deliverables, like the customer team and the global
account team, can subscribe to be notified
automatically as a new item appears in the folder. The
person doing the delivering does not need to know
who should be informed when the deliverable is ready.
• Subscription to documents – A common collaborative
task is sending a document out for review. By
subscribing to a document, you can ask to be notified
automatically when anyone makes a comment about
that document. This allows free commentary without
forcing the commentator to decide who should be sent
Vignette Collaboration
a copy or when they should be notified. Subscription
to a document also informs the interested party when
the document is revised.
• Subscription to Web-based objects – Vignette
Collaboration treats Web objects like any other file or
document in the system, even though they reside on a
remote Web server. Web information objects include
not only documents, like HTML and Adobe Acrobat
files, but also virtual documents such as the results
generated by an Internet search engine. When you
subscribe to a Web object, Vignette Collaboration
informs you when the page changes at the remote Web
server. It does this by efficiently polling remote Web
servers, using HTTP standard protocols, to determine
whether a Web page has changed. The same
subscription machinery also informs you when
someone comments on the Web document, which helps
in the collaborative review of Web materials hosted
remotely, such as Web-based prototypes or proofs.
• Subscription to messages and comments – Vignette
Collaboration helps answer questions by allowing
you to subscribe to individual messages. For example,
you can post a question to a general discussion list
and be notified when a response is posted.
Subscription to a comment works much the same way:
you will be informed if anyone responds or expands
upon the comment.
• Subscription to search – Subscription is an especially
powerful tool when applied to search. When you
conduct a search, the search returns the items that
currently match the query. When you subscribe to a
search, Vignette Collaboration notifies you whenever
any objects are created or collected that match the
query, whether it is tomorrow or next month. As such,
subscribed searches are matched against the real-time
flow of information in the group memory.
By applying subscription to the power of full-text search,
extended with parameters for metadata such as person,
workspace, date and object type, you can create
information flows that support many of the business
information needs that formerly required programming.
13
Examples include:
• “Inform me when a certain news feed service mentions
a particular topic.”
• “Inform me when anyone mentions my customer’s
name or product in the group memory.”
• “Inform me when anyone discovers a Web page that
mentions our product.”
• “Inform me when the department manager says
anything about my area of responsibility in a message,
comment or report.”
• “Inform me about everything the CEO says.”
• “Inform me when progress is delayed.”
• “Inform me when specific goals (or numbers)
are reached.”
Once the search and subscription agents find something
of note, Vignette Collaboration notifies you through an
interactive HTML display and/or an e-mail report. The
HTML display, part of your personal page, shows up-to-
the-minute status on all subscriptions and allows you to
sort and manipulate the display to make best sense of
the data. You can click directly to the objects mentioned
in the display (documents, messages, comments, etc.).
E-mail reports provide notification on an instantaneous or
periodic basis, depending on your preference. The
e-mails contain URL pointers to the information being
described; most modern e-mail systems allow you to click
directly from the URL pointer to open the information in a
Web browser. You can also have notifications sent to
more than one e-mail address, enabling you to be
notified by pager for urgent items or to notify other
designated parties.
E-mail Integration
E-mail serves as the core of communication today. While
the telephone is the primary vehicle for synchronous
communications, e-mail is the medium by which most
people participate in large group collaborations that
span time zones and organizational boundaries. E-mail
also serves as the most universally deployed and heavily
Vignette Collaboration 14

used application on the knowledge worker’s desktop; it’s
something that everyone knows how to use.
E-mail integration lies at the core of Vignette
Collaboration, not simply as a way to have
conversations, but as an essential user-interaction
medium. In large part, Vignette Collaboration simply
becomes part of the e-mail user experience even though
it is not an extension to the e-mail client or server. As a
result, Vignette Collaboration enables you to use familiar
tools and skills to participate fully in the collaborative
workspace. You can send e-mail to a Vignette
Collaboration object (discussions, folders, documents,
account workspaces, project workspaces and others) just
as you send e-mail to people.
E-Mail Integration
Threaded Discussions Contribute Documents
collaboration occurs, rather than on a list of unrelated
discussions. You start and manage discussions, without
administrator intervention, by assigning the e-mail
address to the discussion and initiating the first message.
You can choose to have copies of messages that are sent
to discussions routed through e-mail to a list of recipients,
or recipients can access such messages directly through
the Web interface.
Vignette Collaboration discussions can also be used to
involve outside participants in online collaborations,
independent of whether they are registered users. This
allows outsiders to receive copies of shared information
and to contribute documents and commentary via their
own e-mail clients. Discussions can be used as archives
of conversations by putting the e-mail address of the
discussion on the “cc:” of the messages in the
conversation. Discussions can also be used as e-mail
distribution lists, in which specified people receive copies
of all message traffic going through the discussion.

Capture
Workflow Prompts
Correspondence

Publish Form Data Send Out Contents

Comment On/ Subscription

Review Documents Notifications
Collaborative E-Mail
Services

Figure 8. How Vignette Collaboration Uses E-mail

Participate in Threaded Discussions

Figure 9. Threaded Discussions

Vignette Collaboration discussions capture sequences of

messages, organized by their conversational topics or
“threads,” where each thread is a new topic with its
branching tree of replies. Messages are contributed
either by e-mail or a Web interface, and can include
attachments, including documents and other messages.
Vignette Collaboration stores and indexes all messages
in a discussion, including attachments, for full-text search.
You can start a discussion from any folder, which puts the
context of a discussion in the workspace where the
Capture Correspondence in Folders
Vignette Collaboration allows you to archive
correspondence in folders by simply giving each folder
an e-mail address. To capture and archive an e-mail-
based exchange, simply include the address of the folder
on the “cc:” line of the message. When the e-mail is
replied to, a copy of each message is also captured in
the Vignette Collaboration folder.
Vignette Collaboration
If you want to manually save any e-mail to a workspace,
the message can simply be forwarded to the folder.
Vignette Collaboration recognizes a forwarded message
as content and recovers the original sender, title and date
information. Using folders, you capture key information
normally lost in personal e-mail. Vignette Collaboration
allows you to share e-mail information in this way without
sharing a common groupware infrastructure such as
public folders or Lotus Notes databases.
Contribute Documents to Shared Workspaces
When you mail a message to a Vignette Collaboration
folder, the message is parsed into its component parts
and each part is made into an object. For example, if a
message contains several attachments, each attachment
becomes a Vignette Collaboration document object with
all of the native properties of documents: automatically
publishing with a unique URL, securing with access
control policies, that can be linked to other contexts,
checked out, versioned and so forth. If you mail a
document to a folder without a surrounding message
body, Vignette Collaboration strips away the message
headers and treats the attachment as a stand-alone
document. This mail-in document technique offers a
simple way for you to contribute documents; particularly
mobile workers who can create documents while offline
and later mail them to the workspace.
Vignette Collaboration recovers the proper ownership of
documents sent via e-mail, so the same security rules
govern documents contributed via e-mail as those
contributed via any other protocol, such as Web
browser/HTTP, Web Folders/WebDAV, FTP or Java
Application Program Interface (API).
Publish Call Reports or Other Typical Form Data
Messages or documents sent to folders can be
automatically converted to data of a particular type with
specific attributes. For example, all messages sent into a
“Call Reports” folder for a particular customer can be
converted to the type “call report” with the attribute of
that customer. The data are then automatically displayed
15
with the custom HTML interface appropriate to the type,
and the new objects are tagged for precision search. The
conventional ways to accomplish the same task are
cumbersome: to either use custom forms with fields for
type and customer attributes, as in traditional document
management workflow systems, or to “tag” content
through a manual or semi-automated tagging procedure,
as in older knowledge management solutions.
Maintain URLs and links
Vignette Collaboration automatically publishes each
object with a permanent and unique URL be it a
document, folder or an entire customized workspace.
Vignette Collaboration enables you to e-mail to anyone a
link to any object, which can be done directly from the
Web interface. Since these URLs never change, the links
function regardless of changes in the data. Known as the
“Tell People” function, this ability to send links to content
is very popular.
The “Tell People” feature can be initiated either through
your e-mail system or through the HTML interface. If
activated via the HTML interface, you have the option of
sending a copy of the content, in addition to the link and
their introductory text. This allows, for example, you to
send the latest copy of a document to a customer or any
other person who is not a registered user of the
collaborative workspace. Vignette Collaboration logs the
transaction of sending the content, in order to track what
was sent when and to whom. Because the HTML e-mail
interface is fully integrated with the rest of the
applications environment, you can easily create
streamlined forms for sending content to targeted people
or to lists managed within Vignette Collaboration.
The combination of permanent identifiers and automatic
Web publishing allows you to simply place content on a
server and share it without having to e-mail a copy. The
impact on mobile workers and e-mail storage
management is obvious: when you send links rather than
copies, you spare your colleagues the download
expense of a large attachment, you ensure connection to
the latest version, and you avoid the need to maintain
Vignette Collaboration 16

personal libraries of all the content you utilize. In

practice, you can use your Inbox to maintain links to
content stored in Vignette Collaboration. In addition,
because each object in Vignette Collaboration has its
own URL, you can utilize browser bookmark functions to
maintain links as well.

Participate in Document Approvals

Workers commonly send a copy of a document for

review, and request comments by e-mail. Vignette
Collaboration continues this type of interaction while
reaping the benefits of the shared workspace. When a
document is ready for review, you can send a message
to the reviewers with the document address, instead of e-
mailing the document to everyone. When the reviewers
make edits to your document, there changes are saved
as new versions so that you can easily manage all of the
feedback. The reviewers can also mail comments, which
form a threaded conversation about the document, much
like a dedicated discussion. Replies to comments are also
accurately threaded. And if the reviewers submit
attachments with their comments, Vignette Collaboration
processes any attachments to comments, such as
rewritten sections, like any other attachments. Such
commenting works with versioned documents as well,
with a separate set of threads for each version.
Receive Workflow Prompts
When you submit a document to an approval workflow
process, reminders are sent to approvers via e-mail,
which creates an automated variant on the informal
review process described above, using e-mail. In fact,
any workflow can use any of the e-mail input or output
features in its execution; they are all scriptable through
Vignette Collaboration.
Figure 10. Subscriptions and Notifications
Receive notifications from subscription agents – Vignette
Collaboration Subscription Agents support e-mail
notification in the form of immediate, daily or weekly
messages. The notification text can be modified on a per-
subscription basis and can be directed to any e-mail
address, as well as to any portable devices that have an
e-mail address, such as a BlackBerry, Treo, pager,
personal digital assistant (PDA) and/or cell phone (via
Short Message Services, or SMS). The ability to create
customized e-mail alerts is another way that Vignette
Collaboration lets you tailor the system to your particular
environment and work style.
E-mail Management, Compatibility and Security
Vignette Collaboration provides you with all of the above
mentioned features and value without requiring any
additional software on the client or the server. In other
words, you benefit from all of the collaborative features
of Vignette Collaboration using the e-mail clients and
servers that you already have in place. As a result,
Vignette Collaboration is compatible with virtually all
corporate e-mail systems, and handles security and
e-mail address management for collaboration objects
independently of your e-mail system.
Vignette Collaboration
E-mail Address Management
Although Vignette Collaboration pervasively utilizes
sending e-mail, it also makes managing and finding an
e-mail address a simple task. Such addresses can be
found in a number of ways.
First, Vignette Collaboration appears as a search-
interface address book in your e-mail client, acting as a
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) address
server, if the client is LDAP-enabled (Microsoft Outlook,
Netscape and some Lotus Notes clients). You enter a
search string and Vignette Collaboration returns
addresses with that string, based on the full text search
capability. A search for “Acme” will return all
discussions, folders and other related mentions with
“Acme” in the title, description or any other metadata,
even if “Acme” is not actually part of the e-mail address.
Once found, the user can select the address for use in e-
mail composition, or add it to a personal address book.
Secondly, finding the address of an object or a place in
Vignette Collaboration using the HTML interface is simple
through searching, browsing or by following a received
link. The cover page of every object contains a “mailto”
link with the e-mail address of that object. When you
click on the “mailto” link, the browser opens your default
e-mail client with the address automatically inserted in
the “To:” field of the message. At that point, you can
simply send the message or send and optionally add the
address to your personal address book.
Lastly, submitters can also be told the e-mail address to
which to send comments or to submit documents and
other files. This is particularly useful when you are
seeking input from people outside of the collaborative
workspace. For example, you can publish an e-mail
address for submitting a resume or responding to an
event invitation, and submissions will go directly to the
desired folder in Vignette Collaboration.
Every object or container within Vignette Collaboration
has a static object-ID (OID), related to its URL. By default,
Vignette Collaboration determines the e-mail address of
17
any object through this unique identifier. Alternatively, you
can assign a more meaningful name, such as assigning
the customer name to that customer’s workspace.
Using the deep e-mail integration capabilities of Vignette
Collaboration, applications can mail messages that
prompt approval, allow a document to be checked in, or
perform any other workflow step. You can simply reply to
these messages, and the reply goes automatically to the
desired address in Vignette Collaboration.
E-mail Compatibility and Security
As noted above, Vignette Collaboration allows you to
control the e-mail addresses of objects without any
modification to your existing e-mail system. Being
independent of a specific e-mail infrastructure is very
important for collaboration with partners and customers
outside the firewall. For example, a workspace might live
within the firewall of a firm that runs Microsoft Exchange
internally, and allow collaboration with people in a
different part of the firm who use Lotus Notes e-mail, and
with people outside the firewall who are use Mac Eudora
through an Internet service provider. Vignette
Collaboration does not download anything to your
machine and doesn’t require that you use a specific
e-mail client. It works purely as a Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol (SMTP) peer.
The e-mail address for objects follow the Internet
standards RFC 822 (e-mail address and message
format) and RFC 2055 (MIME formats); as a
consequence, any person who can send e-mail to the
Internet can send e-mail to a collaborative workspace,
even if the workspace is completely inside another
organization’s firewall.
Regarding e-mail address assignment—Vignette
Collaboration enforces name checking at an object’s time
of creation in order to ensure a name/address has not
been taken. Vignette Collaboration allows you and
anyone else with the proper access to change the e-mail
address of a folder after it has been assigned. Throughout
the process, Vignette Collaboration safely keeps its
Vignette Collaboration
addresses apart from e-mail addresses assigned by
mailbox servers. This allows e-mail addresses to be kept
private, as you can create and contribute e-mail directly
to a place in a workspace without that e-mail being
mistakenly routed through some other program or person.
Lastly, all e-mail sent to and from a workspace is
delivered through the standard enterprise infrastructure,
meaning that all of the firewall, server isolation, virus
protection, address validation and other security
measures in place are automatically applied to Vignette
Collaboration-related e-mail.
E-mail Handling: Vignette Collaboration Advantages
Other collaboration products use different schemes for
bridging to e-mail. Two common approaches include
using an external e-mail server to create dedicated mail-
boxes and using a single e-mail address with routing rules.
The first approach creates a parallel e-mail service within
the enterprise for collaboration addresses, distinct from
the normal enterprise e-mail and user account
namespace. To assign an e-mail address to a workspace,
you must first create an inbox account through
administrative software on the parallel e-mail service,
and then enter the name of that account in your
workspace. The workspace then polls the inbox,
checking for new mail, and downloads it. This approach
falls short in that it requires the administration of an
independent e-mail server within the organization, often
using a different technology than the organization has
adopted for e-mail infrastructure. In addition, the parallel
e-mail server is not subject to the same security and virus
protections as the main server, unless you also duplicate
all of those efforts for the new e-mail system. Vignette
Collaboration creates no e-mail accounts, is not a Post
Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Mail Application
Protocol (IMAP) server, and cannot be used to reroute
SMTP traffic from an anonymous client.
The second approach, using a single e-mail address,
also poses security, reliability and scalability problems. It
assigns the same e-mail address to all workspaces, but
18
relies on some key in the subject field or body of the
message to indicate the correct destination, clearly
complicating the user experience. Such an approach
also requires a super-user account that can access all
incoming e-mail, which effectively defeats the privacy
model supported by Vignette Collaboration. Vignette is
unique in its ability to enable you with the power of the
collaborative workspaces without asking you to learn a
new set of tools and support a redundant, duplicate
e-mail system.
Moreover, Vignette Collaboration is:
• Self-contained and IT-friendly – Vignette Collaboration
includes a complete SMTP server to manage system e-
mail. As such, the enterprise e-mail system does not
need to store messages bound for a collaborative
workspace; they are forwarded directly. This has two
critical advantages: Vignette Collaboration remains
neutral with regard to e-mail clients, and leverages
existing virus checking on the enterprise e-mail system.
Vignette Collaboration simply requires a one-time setting
of the forwarding rule by the e-mail administrator.
Because the messages are forwarded by the enterprise
gateway when they arrive, Vignette Collaboration
requires no polling to retrieve messages, eliminating
many scalability problems in a system with thousands of
e-mail destinations. All e-mails and any attachments are
stored directly in the Vignette Collaboration group
memory, thereby eliminating the need for any additional
resources such as disk backup systems.
• Extranet accessible – Virtually all organizations are
structured to send and receive Internet e-mail. Because
Vignette Collaboration e-mail addresses appear to be
organizational destinations, e-mail integration can
extend to people or organizations outside the firewall.
• Simple message management – Because every folder
and object has its own unique e-mail address, Vignette
Collaboration does not need rules-based systems to
route messages to the appropriate folder. Messages to
the system are fully indexed and stored as “message
objects.” In this way, Vignette Collaboration provides
the benefit of storing message content in the group
Vignette Collaboration
memory for search and re-use. Within any
collaborative workspace, e-mail attachments are stored
as independent objects connected to the original
message object. Vignette Collaboration indexes the
object and assigns the OID, usable with or without the
parent message. As mentioned earlier, sending an
attachment with no message text or heading has the
effect of uploading the document directly. Vignette
Collaboration threaded discussions manage the list of
recipients and can include addresses of users that are
not known users of the system. This allows specific
topic discussions to be created that can include a
partner or customer without having specific action
required by the e-mail administrator. Furthermore,
since every object or document has a unique OID, any
messages addressed to those object types create a
comment object associated to that document. In this
way, feedback on a particular object can be posted in
e-mail and reflected in the group memory.
Vignette Collaboration C-Mail Services
Unlike other collaboration solutions, Vignette
Collaboration C-mail Services offer superior capability to
access the rich collaborative environment through your
mobile device or e-mail account. With
C-Mail Services you can bring together the pervasiveness
of e-mail and the ability to mediate and advance
business processes using collaborative applications.
C-Mail Services users have immediate access to the
collaborative solution outside the firewall.
With C-Mail Services, Vignette offers a powerful tool for
anywhere, anytime collaboration, serving as a vehicle
that enables you to interact directly with enterprise
systems so you can truly “live in e-mail” while
collaborating in secure, shared workspaces. This
increases productivity and removes process latency for
mobile and remote users. With Vignette Collaboration
C-Mail Services, the benefits are clear:
• By searching the repository and viewing the search
hits in context through your wireless device, that
device transforms into a powerful vehicle for accessing
your corporate knowledge base
19
• By forwarding documents and search results from your
mobile device, you impress customers and executives
with timely responses to inquiries, and eliminate items
on your to-do list
• By receiving notifications from your search agents, you
remain in real-time contact with account teams and
reduce process latency.
Vignette Collaboration offers a new level of security for
e-mail transactions. C-Mail Services includes both
authentication and authorization features that help
ensure enterprise security and prevent fraudulent activity.
For example, only the person that has “checked out” a
document can check it back in, and e-mail contributions
can only be made by authenticated IDs. C-Mail Services
security supports all existing e-mail clients and does not
require any additional software downloads.
Vignette Collaboration offers the unique capability of
accessing workspaces and their rich collaborative
features through mobile devices and through e-mail.
Now even your mobile employees will benefit in real-
time from the powerful capabilities of Vignette
Collaboration. Specific features enable you to:
• Submit search requests through e-mail or mobile
device
• View the text contents of search hits with context
• Receive notifications and alerts to your mobile devices
• Check in/out documents through e-mail
• Set up, capture and store discussion threads
And include:
• A new user interface tailored especially for mobile
devices
• Support for mobile e-mail devices including
BlackBerry, Compaq Ipaq, and Palm Treo devices
• Security features for e-mail transactions
Document and Content Management
Vignette Collaboration offers document and content
management services for documents in the group
Vignette Collaboration 20

memory. Sometimes referred to as “library services”, • Approval workflow – Vignette Collaboration also
these capabilities are critical for collaborative authoring, supports approval workflow processes that make it
editing and reviewing since they help you ensure the easy to route a document to the appropriate parties for
integrity of the information. approval. E-mail reminders are sent, allowing each

• Document publishing and identity – Unique and individual to access the item by URL, then review, edit

permanent URLs identify all documents, independent of and comment. Throughout the process, Vignette

folder path. This allows collaboration around Collaboration enforces access control.

references to these documents, even as their contents

and filenames change. For example, if you post a file
to a workspace, the document’s URL remains the same
even as new versions with different filenames are
uploaded.
• Document locking – You can securely “check out” a
document to change it. Locking differs from access
control, which determines who has the right to
potentially change the document. Vignette
Collaboration provides long-duration locking so that
people can collaboratively edit documents without
accidentally overwriting each other’s work. Vignette
Collaboration implements locking at the platform level,
thereby enforcing it across all interfaces that have a
locking concept. For example, if someone opens a
Microsoft Office PowerPoint document using Web
folders, the Microsoft Office PowerPoint software locks
the document using the WebDAV protocol. If Vignette
Collaboration sees a lock request over WebDAV, it
enforces it over HTTP.
Productivity Tools
Vignette Collaboration includes out-of-the-box templates
for dashboards, tasks, calendars, and polls. As with any
other collaboration object, you can customize any of
these to fit your specific requirements. By using these
templates, you can quickly and easily add additional
information sharing options to your workspaces.
• Dashboards – Your executives and managers have a
global view across departments, accounts and
projects. From any workspace, you can create an
activity dashboard that displays the status of, and links
to, key business activities such as project plans, project
issues, sales opportunities and customer requests. Each
dashboard can be filtered for updates to these
activities or display the status of all activities. You can
configure the highly customizable dashboards to track
activities for individuals, teams, business groups, or
cross-enterprise communities.

• Document versioning – Versioning allows a sequence

of versions of the same document to be captured.
When you enable versioning for a document, Vignette
Collaboration automatically creates a sequence of
documents with unique URLs when the document is
saved or updated (preserving the stable URL for the
most recent version). Vignette Collaboration allows
independent commenting on each version, which is
useful for capturing collaborative review of content
such as specification documents, business proposals,
and RFP responses. Furthermore, Vignette
Collaboration enables you to check in and out
Figure 11. Project Dashboard
documents and enforces version control through e-mail
through the Vignette Collaboration C-Mail Services.
Vignette Collaboration 21

• Tasks and Calendars – You can create calendars to are provided through Vignette Collaboration’s support
communicate milestones, meetings and other key for the UTF-8 character set.
shared events for project teams, business groups, or
cross-enterprise communities. Calendars integrate with
Microsoft Office Outlook so users send their Vignette
Collaboration calendar tasks to Microsoft Office
Outlook and combine group activities and individual
commitments into a single personalized view. Within
each workspace, you can create tasks with owners,
due dates, and priorities that link to the collaborative
activities in the workspace. You receive automatic e-
mail notifications of new tasks assigned to you
including links to the workspaces that provide the
background and business context for the tasks to be
performed.

• Polls – From any workspace, you can launch polls to

allow team members, business groups, or other
enterprise groups to vote on topics or issues. You can
also submit comments to explain your choices. Vignette
Collaboration tabulates polling responses and displays
them as graphics and as tables, enabling you and
your teams to make quick decisions and also capture
decision history and rationale for future reference.
Support for Multiple Languages
Vignette Collaboration supports the simultaneous display,
storage, and search of documents and information in
virtually any language, including Eastern European and
Asian languages such as Russian, Thai, Japanese,
Korean, Simplified or Traditional Chinese, Turkish, and
Greek. Workspaces can contain documents in different
languages without any modification or customization.
Regardless of the language, all documents and
information are indexed and available for search and
retrieval.
The Vignette Collaboration end user interface can also
be localized into virtually any language. Although
English is the default end user interface language that is
provided out-of-the-box, Vignette Collaboration includes
a Localization Development Kit (LDK) that enables the
end user interface localization. Both of these capabilities
Figure 12. Sample workspace containing documents
in multiple languages
Web Services and Standards
Vignette developers have created a tightly integrated
and secure platform for collaborative business solutions.
Low-level collaborative capabilities include features such
as full-text indexing of over 200 document types,
securing every object through rigorous policy
management rules (regardless of the communication
protocol), and keeping users informed of new
information.
Vignette Collaboration includes rich protocol support
(LDAP, FTP, HTTP, WebDAV, SMTP) including a fully
supported Java API and a tag language used to develop
Web-based user interfaces; all leveraging these core
enterprise collaboration services in a way that protects
the underlying data. For example, retrieving an object is
the same whether the object is a Web document, a
comment on an object, an e-mail, or something stored in
Oracle or SQL Server.
Vignette Collaboration 22

A collaborative solution must be integrated into the way
you and your colleagues work for it to be effective.
Vignette Collaboration provides a robust mechanism for
integrating collaboration into business practices through
the highly flexible user interface with data and workflow
integration. Vignette Collaboration accomplishes this
through extensive standards support and open APIs.
Because of its fine granularity, any portion of the user
interface can be presented securely through any other
HTML Web-enabled application such as an enterprise
portal or a line of business application like Customer
Relationship Management (CRM). In addition, user
interface elements can be included in single-sign-on
infrastructures. Events in one system can spawn events in
Vignette Collaboration and vice versa.
Comprehensive Security Model
the membership of a group mentioned on a policy, and
the right to change the policy that governs a particular
object. This flexibility supports a range of collaborative
models in the same, shared environment and avoids the
IT administrative bottleneck that burdens most
collaboration software.
In addition, Vignette Collaboration offers a new level of
security for e-mail transactions. Vignette Collaboration C-
Mail Services includes both authentication and
authorization features that enable enterprise security and
prevent fraudulent activity. For example, only the person
that has “checked out” a document can check it back in,
and e-mail contributions can only be made by
authenticated IDs. C-Mail Services security supports all
existing e-mail clients and does not require any
additional software downloads.

Vignette Collaboration supports a fundamental principal Integration with Other Vignette Products
of access policy management wherein if you are not
As a critical member of the complete Vignette family of
authorized to read or view a given object, then you
products, Vignette Collaboration shares many traits with
should not know of its existence. For example, Vignette
other Vignette products. Vignette products such as
Collaboration filters all search results by your ability to
Vignette Portal, Vignette Content Management, and
read the object before it presents the search results to
Vignette Records & Documents share a common look and
you. All protocols (FTP, HTTP, WebDAV, etc.) obey the
feel, as well as a similar J2EE architecture as Vignette
same principal. If you log in under FTP, the information
Collaboration. While all of these offerings stand well on
presented is the same as would be found in the HTTP
their own, together they can support the entire
interface. This “can’t read, can’t see” applies to all
information value-chain from collaborative creation to
objects including: Users, Policies, Folders, Documents,
document and records management, imaging and
Discussions, and any custom objects.
workflow, and personalized targeted delivery within and
Vignette Collaboration allows you to easily decide which outside the firewall.
individuals or groups can read, modify, delete, or find
Vignette Collaboration and Vignette Portal can be used
information contained in the group memory. Your project
in combination to create rich online applications that are
teams can quickly develop and deploy access control
based on collaborative tools and processes. By using
policies suitable for extended teams throughout the
these two products together, you can include
organization. Five tiers of permissions can be assigned
collaborative capabilities (via collaboration portlets) in-
to individual objects, and to any combination of users
line with other application portlets. Consider the
and named groups within a given workspace. Vignette
requirements of an employee Intranet as an example.
Collaboration treats access policies as information
Adding collaborative capabilities to an employee
objects, and as such subjects them to their own access
Intranet delivered through Vignette Portal helps you to
policies. Uniform, granular access makes it possible to
share documents with remote team members, enhance
delegate the right to change a policy, the right to change
your cross-functional communication, and repurpose
Vignette Collaboration
information—all for significant bottom-line savings. This
environment also helps you capture information typically
lost through informal communications.
Vignette Collaboration enhances Vignette Content
Management by bringing a full suite of collaborative
capabilities to the Web content management application.
These capabilities make it possible for diverse, distributed
teams to collaboratively author content to be delivered to
the Web. Consider a co-marketing effort by two separate
companies that have entered into a partnership. While
both companies have a Web content management
system, neither company makes their Web content
management application available to people outside of
their respective company. This fact makes it difficult to
jointly develop Web content as it forces the teams to
develop the content outside of their Web content
management applications and then manually enter the
content into those systems upon completion of the content
creation. Vignette Collaboration simplifies business
situations like these by providing workspaces in which the
content can be jointly developed by people from both
companies. These workspaces can then automatically
move the finished content into the Web content
management application for publishing to the Web.
Vignette Records & Documents extends DOD 5015.2-
certified records management controls to collaborative
workspaces within Vignette Collaboration. As
compliance and governance regulations continue to
evolve, it becomes more difficult for you to ensure
compliance throughout your entire organization. Using
Vignette Records & Documents together with Vignette
Collaboration helps you meet compliance mandates
without sacrificing the productivity benefits of
collaborative workspaces. With the combined solution,
you can automatically create records (with retention
policies, digital signatures, etc.) as part of the
collaborative approval processes that occur within
workspaces. This solution is especially helpful for
distributed teams creating official documents such as
contracts, policies, and government filings.
23
Collaborative Solutions
Vignette currently provides two collaborative solutions
designed for specific critical business challenges:
Vignette Strategic Account Management and Vignette
Project Delivery. These solutions are built on the open,
extensible Vignette Collaboration product and provide
specific features core to the business functions, workflow
and processes within these disciplines.
Vignette’s collaborative solutions provide a user-friendly,
cohesive and highly flexible collaboration environment.
This environment creates what Vignette calls “group
memory” that preserves individual and collaborative work
and makes it available to be shared and retrieved for later
reuse. Using e-mail, desktop applications and Web-based
workspaces, people can manage business relationships,
share information and accomplish their tasks.
Vignette Strategic Account Management
Chances are you sell your products and services through
large teams that can number from five to 50 or more
when selling into large accounts. These sales teams must
manage several engagements at once across product
teams and geographies, and typically have to manage
the exchange of very technical and complex information
and files with team members, prospects and partners.
These sales cycles can also take from 6 months to several
years depending on the products or services. As a result,
sales engagements become dynamic activities as the
selling methodology rarely tracks with the buying
processes employed by prospects and customers. It’s
critical for every account team member to track their
sales process closely, but this can be extremely time-
consuming if the team members do not have an online
environment that supports sales repeatability and
collaborative selling, even if a strict selling methodology
is in place.
Another challenge involves providing sales management
with consistent and current account and opportunity
reports. All too often, sales management does not have
the visibility into sales engagements it needs, especially
Vignette Collaboration
into critical issues and deliverables. Many times sales
management ends up hearing about these critical issues
only after it is too late. The resulting “fire drills” typically
require account teams to repeatedly shift their focus from
selling activities to assembling last-minute progress
reports and creating one-off internal account status
materials. All of this adds up to high cost and low
efficiency. Having your highly paid account teams doing
low-value coordination work increases sales costs and
reduces profitability. Specific capabilities that help
alleviate these issues include:
• Out-of-the-box capabilities necessary to create account
and opportunity workspaces with folders for account
information, current projects, official documents,
opportunities, support teams, access policies and
account discussion forums.
• Folders for managing incoming and outgoing
proposals and contracts; each folder allows the
documents contained in the folder to be versioned,
linked to, submitted to a workflow process, or
subscribed to so that account team members are
notified when the document changes.
• Access policies that can be set at the folder or
document level in order to help ensure proper security
and protection of confidential account information.
• Ability to quickly deploy customer and partner
Extranets that deliver only components of the account
workspace you choose to expose, while still protecting
sensitive internal information related to the opportunity.
• Workspaces that enable account team members to
search and contribute content, check-in and checkout
content, collaborate on issues, comment on documents,
and participate in approval workflows—all directly
through e-mail.
• Workspaces that orchestrate account team efforts with
account and opportunity document and content
management, threaded account and opportunity
discussions, account-related task management and
calendaring.
• Increased account management effectiveness through
their ability to deliver a combination of collaborative
24
capabilities, and where necessary, information from
key existing enterprise applications (CRM systems,
etc.) that may already be in use.
• Personalized capabilities to maximize team member’s
productivity; easily create custom searches and agents
to help ensure team members always know the status
of relevant account information such as draft account
proposals, product suggestions and support issues.
• “Group memory,” that develops as account teams
create and share work products; with the Group
Memory accessible to current and future account
teams, organizations can benefit from the ability to
reuse virtually any work product such as contracts,
proposals, account strategy plans and policies.
Vignette Project Delivery
Organizations define objectives in terms of project-based
deliverables. These objectives are often achieved through
the incremental contributions of multiple participants in a
single process. The key to efficiently managing the
process behind these projects is a well integrated,
shared online project workspace. Today, most projects
are managed individually, and it becomes difficult to
share or utilize project work products over time. Once
this project information is in disparate locations across
an organization—internal or external to the
organization—the information is at risk of being lost,
falling out of date, walking out the door when employees
leave or are reassigned, or when partnerships end.
As the number of projects running concurrently increases,
the importance of coordination across your organization
becomes paramount. Project teams and managers
quickly can become overwhelmed, at times their project
work becoming negatively affected by their workload. In
order to ease the pressure and help prevent overload, all
members of the project team (from both inside and
outside the organization) must share information and
communicate openly.
Current systems and productivity tools aid project team
members in completing their specific tasks, but
generally lack the capabilities to enable project team
Vignette Collaboration
members to effectively share their work products and
communicate their progress to management and the rest
of the project team.
The current economic environment and internal budget
pressures can present you with mounting pressures from
both inside and outside your organization to complete
more projects with fewer resources. Managers are faced
with making strategic project decisions and face
increasing pressure to prioritize projects and resources.
Project success or failure depends on your organization’s
ability to effectively manage multiple projects across
functional, geographic and organizational boundaries.
To be successful, project team members, project
managers, program managers and executives require
visibility into project issues and opportunities as they
arise. Vignette solutions can provide the following:
• Improved project team productivity and efficiency with
collaborative Extranets, robust security and access
controls, and powerful search and index functionality
for effective project management
• Online project workspaces where people share and
discuss their work that can be easily accessed through
productivity applications and e-mail clients (even
offline) and integrated into other business applications
• Specific template-based project workspaces that
deliver dashboard views into team status, as well as
subscriptions and notifications so teams can determine
when items are being updated or changed
• Out-of-the-box templates for standard methodologies
such as Six Sigma and CMMI (Capability Maturity
Model Integration).
• Collaborative functions including the ability to search
and contribute content, check-in and checkout project-
related content, communicate on project issues,
comment on documents and participate in approval
workflows directly through e-mail
• The ability to orchestrate project efforts across
workspaces, including document and content
management, discussion threading, task management
and calendaring; optionally provide connectivity to
25
Microsoft Project Server in order to bring all required
project information together in the workspace
• The ability to leverage corporate knowledge by
combining full-text search and relational query
capabilities, storing and presenting information in
business context, and utilizing knowledge agents to
help complete projects faster and easier
A Collaborative Framework
Vignette Collaboration provides a framework that greatly
simplifies the development of collaborative solutions,
enabling business analysts and Web designers to quickly
build and deploy the desired applications. The
Collaborative Framework does this by providing a rich
development environment that extends and integrates
Vignette Collaboration into existing systems and evolving
business processes.
Integration with CRM Applications
The Collaborative Framework provides the core
infrastructure and flexible mechanisms that enable
Vignette Collaboration to be easily and seamlessly
integrated with many enterprise applications, such as
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications.
CRM applications are effective for pipeline tracking and
forecasting, but they do not enable your sales force and
account teams to find the information and experts that
they need to solve problems. They do not provide secure
Extranet workspaces to deepen your customer
relationships. Because of this, Vignette Collaboration is a
compelling compliment to CRM applications.
There are three components to the Collaborative
Framework that are relevant to CRM:
• Integrated user interface – The Vignette Collaboration
template engine dynamically generates pieces of a
collaborative workspace page separately such as the
footer, command bar, navigation bar, content section
and context section. This enables a Vignette
Collaboration-CRM integration to seamlessly display
Vignette Collaboration
only selected content and commands without confusing
you with unwanted information and features.
• Shared data – Data can be shared between CRM
systems and Vignette Collaboration via the HTTP API
or the Java API (KMAPI). Automatically importing and
updating data from the CRM system as metadata on
Vignette Collaboration objects provides further context
to the collaborative workspaces and enables more
powerful searches. For example, an opportunity
workspace may contain metadata specifying status,
estimated close date and industry. This enables the
team working in Vignette Collaboration to more fully
understand the opportunity and to more accurately
search for relevant previous work. Additionally, final
document versions or other unstructured data from
Vignette Collaboration can be exported to the CRM
system using these APIs and/or by modifying Vignette
Collaboration templates.
• Shared workflow – Business processes frequently
require both structured and unstructured data for
successful completion. Many implementation options
for shared workflow exist in the Collaborative
Framework. In addition to the HTTP and Java APIs to
make direct calls to/for Vignette Collaboration
objects, more complex functionality can be achieved
through server-side scripting. This allows seamless
interaction with the server as scripts can make calls to
the Vignette Collaboration class files through KMAPI,
and the Vignette Collaboration Event Handler, which
can automate operations through notifications and
custom scripts.
Portal-Ready Solutions
In today’s business environment, you use multiple,
disconnected systems to do your job—e-mail, office
documents, Intranets, enterprise applications, analytical
tools, the Internet, and more. Mission-critical information,
data, and expertise needed to make better and more
informed decisions is dispersed across multiple silos of
information and data stores, not just enterprise
26
applications. Vignette provides the applications to solve
this problem.
Unlike traditional applications that require extensive
work to add even minor customizations, the
Collaborative Framework provides flexible mechanisms
wherein customizations can be readily added to Vignette
Collaboration. Features of Vignette Collaboration can be
readily added to a different system, allowing Vignette
Collaboration to be seamlessly integrated with any
enterprise portal solution. What’s more, Vignette
Collaboration provides a set of integration portlets that
are specifically designed to work with Vignette Portal—
Vignette’s enterprise portal solution. There are three
components to Vignette Collaboration that are relevant to
enterprise portals:
• Single sign-on – Through its modular authentication
framework, Vignette Collaboration can support any
portal connection model while accepting user
credentials from external security authorities. This
enables a single sign-on environment for Vignette
Collaboration integrations. This can result in increased
user satisfaction and adoption, as well as lower
administration costs. Vignette Collaboration utilizes
Java Authentication and Authorization Service (JAAS)
to accept other systems’ user authentication, such as
Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP Servers.
• Modular user interface – The Vignette Collaboration
Template Engine dynamically generates pieces of the
Vignette Collaboration pages separately. This enables
portals to display only selected content and commands
without polluting the screen with irrelevant user
interface elements. In fact, this is precisely what the
portlets for Vignette Portal provide—a series of highly
flexible views that expose just the functionality your
portal users require.
• Customizable look and feel – Every part of a Vignette
Collaboration display is exceptionally flexible through
simple HTML modifications. For color and font choices,
Vignette Collaboration uses cascading style sheets
(CSS) for quick, simple adjustments. Additionally,
Vignette Collaboration
Vignette Collaboration can support multiple style
definitions for a single server implementation, enabling
separate views to match portal look and feel and/or
different styles relevant to specific users. These features
create a common user experience and a familiar place
to work.
Rich Development Environment
Modular user interface elements – With a modular and
reusable template-based user interface, isolated from a
given application’s business logic, the Vignette
Collaboration user interface is easily shaped to any
situation. The figure below is an example of how a
customer view might vary from an internal user view. In
this example, the Extranet user sees tabs rather than
folders, the layout and branding are different, and the
command bars are limited.
Modifications are made to the default user interface via
HTML files called templates. A Web developer can make
changes to the file visuals without changing the
underlying data models or business rules, allowing a
running system to be customized in place.
Web Browser
Web Server
Template Server
Vignette Collaboration Solutions
Figure 13. Template Structure
Within the template files exists a layer of business logic
coded in a tag language that allows a programmer of
modest skills to change how certain items are displayed.
27
Again, it is impossible to corrupt the underlying database
through the tag language. The use of these tags can be
augmented with server-side scripts to build complex
business logic for implementing custom features and
building advanced workflows.
The Vignette Collaboration user interface is implemented
via a series of user interface libraries. These modular
packages of user interface functionality can be readily
modified to suit specific needs, making seamless the
integration of the Vignette Collaboration user interface
with another Web-based application. As noted, the
Collaborative Framework also supports a view
mechanism that provides for specific users to have their
own user interface.
Vignette Collaboration user interface templates can run
on existing servers without changing the underlying
database schema or even restarting the server. The
business analyst can decide that a particular custom
object needs additional information, make the change to
the custom type definition, and be assured that every
new object of that type will have the latest information.
Rich HTTP API – Vignette Collaboration has a 100
percent Web-native interface with no applets, which runs
in standard browsers. Because the HTTP interface is
stateless, other applications can make calls directly into
Vignette Collaboration via the HTTP API. Some of the
types of transactions exposed as HTTP requests include
access content, return search results, create new objects,
change attributes, reorganize content, perform
administrative functions, and launch server-side scripts.
Vignette Collaboration enforces transactional semantics
on these operations; all must meet strict target access
control rules.
Java API & server-side scripts – In addition to a complete
HTTP API, Vignette Collaboration also provides a
complete Java API called KMAPI, which provides a local
(same server) process to call Vignette Collaboration
directly. Remote servers can access Vignette
Collaboration via HTTP tunneling.
Vignette Collaboration
In addition to providing access to other programs,
Vignette Collaboration supports JSP as a scripting
language, which allows seamless interaction with the
server as scripts can make calls to the Vignette
Collaboration class files through KMAPI. With server-side
scripting, operations that might have required several
calls through the HTTP API can be bundled together and
accomplished in a single step, and such server-side
scripts can be initiated with simple HTTP calls.
Event management – The rich event management
capability of Vignette Collaboration can be used to
create steps in workflows or manage complete workflow
scenarios. For example, the creation of a new object can
trigger user or process notification and the execution of
business logic related to system events. In this way, many
operations can be automated, particularly those that a
user might forget.
Extensible data model and custom object runtime – The
Vignette Collaboration data model uses a flexible
object-oriented approach. There are base objects and
base containers.
Object Types:
• Document – An object representing content that can be
stored in digital form
• WebDocument – An object like a document, except its
contents are stored remotely and served over HTTP
• Message – Submitted by e-mail or created directly in a
discussion using the Vignette Collaboration HTML
interface
• Comment – Similar to a message, has a text body,
possible attachments and reply threads; is not a stand-
alone object, always exists relative to another object
• Query (also called a saved search) – Preserves the
parameters of a search query so that the search can
be re-run and used for subscription
• User – A person with an account
• Policy (short for access policy) – Determines who can
do what to an object; all objects are governed by a
policy, including policy objects themselves
28
Container Objects:
• Folder – The fundamental container type used to
represent categories, topics, projects, lists, inboxes, or
sets of documents
• Cabinet – Only appears at the top level of a group
memory
• Home Object – Rests at the top of the hierarchy
• Discussion – Specializes in managing e-mails by
organizing messages into topic threads; also forwards
messages to recipients
• Group – Sets of users, used to specify access policies;
can also receive e-mail
• Users and Groups – Set of all users and groups
• Access Policies – Lists all access policies defined in the
group memory; automatically maintained by Vignette
Collaboration
Note that any data object can have a user-driven set of
metadata applied. For example, a document can also
have a type called “tech note”. This new type variable
can then be used to improve searches. Because Vignette
Collaboration manages all database transactions at the
external API, no schema changes are necessary to
support a change to the object model.
In order to more closely map collaborative spaces to a
specific business process, new object types can be
added which appear as base objects. To facilitate
creation and management of these custom objects,
Vignette Collaboration provides a Custom Type Factory.
The Custom Type Factory allows you to create a new
Custom Type Definition through an easy-to-use wizard.
When you create a new instance of that object, the
Custom Object Runtime uses the Custom Type Definition
to define the specific parameters required. The user
interface necessary for user interaction with these custom
objects is generated automatically by the Custom Object
Runtime and does not require HTML programming.
By using the Custom Type Factory to create new objects
and define object relationships, deep software
Vignette Collaboration 29

development becomes far simpler, with the added benefit
that Custom Type Definitions can be changed as needed
without affecting the existing custom objects or the
underlying data management.
Custom collaborative spaces – The Collaborative
Framework user interface wizard automates the creation
of pre-defined collaborative workspaces. Templates of
collaborative spaces can be more than a simple
hierarchy of objects; they can include specific taxonomy,
content, discussions, and most importantly, specific local
access policies and local groups. Using workspace
templates ensures rapid, consistent implementation of
secure workspaces.
User management and single sign-on – Vignette
Collaboration synchronizes user records with an
enterprise directory server via an LDAP client. The
Vignette Collaboration LDAP client requests user
information useful to the collaborative environment and
also supports fixed LDAP groups, dynamic groups and
live queries to the LDAP server, including Microsoft
Active Directory.
Vignette Collaboration supports the Java Authentication
clustering ability is provided out-of-the-box with Vignette
Collaboration, and works for Web, FTP, LDAP and e-mail
access to Vignette Collaboration. The Vignette
Collaboration Administration Console enables
centralized cluster management for all collaboration
services. Since Vignette Collaboration includes out-of-the-
box clustering support, you do not need to invest in
additional application server licenses in order to support
a 24/7 architecture.
Open Architecture
With any enterprise solution, compatibility with existing
and emerging standards is critical. Built on J2EE
technology, Vignette Collaboration runs on popular
enterprise operating systems and supports the leading
relational databases. Vignette Collaboration fits your
existing infrastructure to leverage previous investments.
The figure below depicts how Vignette Collaboration
integrates within your existing information technology
infrastructure.
E-Mail Microsoft IE Web
Web Browser Unix, Mac
Programs Office Folders

Lotus Notes, HTTP

MS Exchange, WebDAV FTP
and Authorization Services (JAAS) standard for adding
HTTPS
Wireless E-Mail RSS

Enterprise SMTP HTTP Enterprise

plug-able authentication modules, which can authorize Mail Server
Vignette Collaboration Solutions
Search

against a wide variety of security systems. A module can Enterprise LDAP JSR
Directory Portal

be created and used to validate user credentials (usually Server

username and password) against whatever relevant Security&

JAAS Java
Enterprise
Auth Service Applications
system within an organization. Often portals will already
validate the user’s credentials and set a token for other Oracle
Windows
Solaris
applications. A module can also be created to use
SQL Server
Linux AIX

various tokens.
These two capabilities allow mixed user interfaces, such
as a portal, to provide sign-on to Vignette Collaboration
and data sharing between enterprise applications and
Vignette Collaboration.
High Availability
Vignette Collaboration is built upon a true, enterprise
class architecture that helps ensure 24/7 high
availability through embedded clustering. This critical
Figure 14. Vignette Collaboration Integrates via
Standard Protocols
• Integration with e-mail – As emphasized earlier in this
paper, Vignette Collaboration is highly integrated with
e-mail. E-mail contributions to the group memory are
accomplished through the use of SMTP. Vignette
Collaboration also includes a built-in LDAP server that
allows users to search and browse Vignette
Collaboration e-mail addresses directly from their
existing e-mail application.
Vignette Collaboration
• Integration with Web browsers – Vignette
Collaboration includes a Web-based user interface
that runs in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla
Firefox. The server interacts with Web agents over
HTTP using the standard Java Servlet architecture.
Vignette Collaboration comes with its own HTTP server
and supports the use of other Web servers.
• Integration with desktop applications – Vignette
Collaboration includes a WebDAV server that allows
folders within collaborative workspaces to have the
appearance and functionality of file system folders.
Vignette Collaboration also includes an FTP server that
allows information transfer between applications such
as Microsoft Office.
• Integration with other sources of electronic information
– Vignette Collaboration includes an HTTP client that
collects and monitors the content of external Web
pages, including those that provide access to reports
from Web-compliant applications. Vignette
Collaboration makes all of its information available in
XML format, which is accessible over the HTTP API.
The WebDAV server also supports programmatic data
exchange, including file contents and custom
metadata, using XML over HTTP.
Summary
Amidst significant changes in business brought on by the
rapid advance of technology and by increasing
globalization, one thing is constant: you and your
organization must be responsive to your customers and
to changes in the market. To meet these challenges, you
must make the best use of your resources.
Knowledge about customers, services, and products (in
both structured and the more pervasive unstructured
forms) ranks first among your resources. But managing
knowledge alone will not bring you success without
leveraging the power of your extended organization. As
traditional organizational boundaries give way to a Web
of partners, consultants, vendors, and customers,
coordination with these parties takes on new significance.
30
Enterprise collaboration comprises the sharing of
knowledge across the geographic and relationship
expanse of business today. The Vignette approach is
compelling: employing a Web-based, collaborative
workspace that serves as a foundation for all knowledge
sharing, tying together unstructured and process-specific
knowledge in an environment where you can truly
collaborate across the breadth of your extended
organization. In addition, Vignette Collaboration
provides a scalable infrastructure tightly integrated with
existing enterprise applications.
Leveraging e-mail, desktop applications and Web-based
workspaces, Vignette Collaboration provides a single
environment where you and your colleagues can truly
collaborate, manage relationships, share information
and drive inter-organizational collaboration.
Furthermore, Vignette Collaboration addresses critical
phases of the business collaboration lifecycle: customer,
services and product collaboration.
Built on an open, extensible platform, Vignette
Collaboration provides specific features that are core to
business functions, workflows and processes, including:
flexible collaborative workspaces, document
management, search tools, subscription agents,
dashboards, tasks, calendars, polls, instant messaging,
and connectivity to live meeting tools.
Vignette Collaboration provides these features in a rich
environment with a comprehensive security model, all of
which fits exceedingly well into the enterprise ecology.
And because Vignette Collaboration has full e-mail
integration (greatly simplifying the user experience), it
has the power, flexibility, and usability demanded by the
complex set of challenges posed to your business today.
Vignette Collaboration is part of an integrated ECM
family of products that can help organizations grow their
business, increase productivity, reduce costs, manage
their risk and improve their interactions with key
constituents. Vignette’s ECM family of products allows
organizations to manage the complete lifecycle of
information to share information, optimize business
 Vignette Collaboration 31

processes, integrate with applications, personalize the

delivery for global applications through multiple channels
or devices, and control documents and records. Using
Vignette, organizations can leverage their records,
documents, Web pages, images, e-mails, multimedia,
Web transactions, faxes, database records and other
unstructured content to create new opportunities, expand
profits and realize greater savings and efficiencies.

For more information about Vignette’s Enterprise Content

Management solutions, and their demonstrated value to
over 1,700 organizations worldwide, visit
www.vignette.com or call +1 888.608.9900.

Vignette Corporate Headquarters Vignette Latin America Vignette Europe/Middle-East/Africa Vignette Asia-Pacific
1301 South MoPac Expressway
Suite 100 305.789.6603 Tel 44.1628.77.2000 Tel 61.2.9455.5000 Tel
Austin, TX 78746-5776 305.789.6612 Fax 44.1628.77.2266 Fax 61.2.9455.5200 Fax
512.741.4300 Tel lainfo@vignette.com euroinfo@vignette.com asiapacinfo@vignette.com
512.741.4500 Fax
888.608.9900 Toll-Free
E-mail info@vignette.com

WP0606 Collaboration Publication Date: June 2006. Vignette does not warrant, guarantee, or make representations concerning the contents of this document. All information is provided “AS-IS,” without express or im-
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