Shareholders have approved our acquisition and now we are Open Text.
Its great to know that the acquisition got through and there are no shocking news that inevitably lead to vignettes destruction.
We are expected to have an awesome future so let us finish the turn and clear the corner to the great adventure amongst our new friends at open text.

There are 2 pre warnings I am to put on this post.
1. This post is my own personal opinion and not of my employer
2. I am a vignette employee and have been offended by the paper thus this post uses harsh language. If you believe you will be offended by this post don’t read it. If you have decided to read it you are the sole responsible of your actions and Yuval Ararat will not be responsible.

The second wave is on now and the attack over Vignette using deception and frightening techniques just went to a whole new level.
I am now pissed, really pissed. This Clickability white paper just makes no sense and uses false information to intimidate customers of V5/6 from upgrading to vignette.
The white paper is full of half truths, but those i can accept as legit, like the V7 upgrade quoted at 1.5 million. That is a nice number but what hides behind it? What were the requirements and how much of that was the licensing cost? It does try to support the fact that licensing is expensive.

According to public financial reports, Vignette sold very few V7 licenses last year. Ever wonder why? First, there’s the cost. One Vignette customer (who wishes to remain anonymous) told us he had been quoted a $1.5 million price tag for a V7 upgrade.

Sorry mate but the upgrade is more then the licensing costs to say the least, usually the professional services or the agency bill is triple the cost so he got a nice deal in this case on the licensing.
Then they ask a legit question that has no grasp of truth

Who’s Working on Vignette 7.6 After the Layoff?

To answer it simply i am doing it now at a client site, so you can guess who.
As far as I know the layoffs had no effect on client’s activities nor on implementation of the new versions, making this question a more means of bringing the layoffs into the paper rather then introducing constructive information for their case.

Traditionally, when it comes to “upgrades” Vignette doesn’t even eat its own dog food. Once
again, according to CMS Wire, “And while we’re at it, we have to mention something about long
product development cycles, and Vignette’s slowness in adopting its own new releases. Would
that be out of fear of complex content migrations and painful upgrades?”

No, No, no no no. You are missing the point and clinging to falsehood again.
Dear Sir Robin, who robs to provide, we make many of the upgrades as VPS and as such eat our own dog food. Some of the migrations are complex from many reasons and some are as simple as a months work, all depends on the implementation and the customers approach to development.

I think that Vignette Clients are slow to adopt from 2 main reasons:
1. They don’t have the need and like the product they are with.
2. They are Enterprises and as such take time to make the decision and gather the funding. they are not little op shops where the owner is the IT is the Marketing like most of your clients.

Yes, it’s true that years ago Vignette was a CMS pioneer. But since then, the company has simply
failed to anticipate the speed at which the Web evolves (for the record, the head of Vignette has
publicly stated that the company completely missed the Web 2.0 train by failing to execute).

Now did we? Look at the CMS wire and take your pick of who is more reliable resource.

Yes, Vignette is a proven innovator

Oh as for the claim that the clients don’t embrace the new tech fast enough i have to disagree, they do so quicker then the industry perceive. Portal 7.4 was grabbed in the first days it was out and so did the VCM 7.6.
Vignette is the master of slow or no innovation. Ha! Should i respond to that? No i don’t think so i think they never seen the product suit and they are relating to customers who will never will. Guess Clickability has the capabilities in the space of the Collaboration server and the Community applications and services offering vignette has and with the ability to put it in enterprise server architecture. Oh, you don’t, maybe the cloud gods will grant you your wish.
But wait, SaaS will solve it all and the cloud will import all of your data automatically within weeks. So you will be up and running quicker then a speeding bullet.

Like Salesforce.com, Clickability is a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company that lives in the cloud.There is no expensive software or hardware to buy or install. We provide our solution entirely in the cloud with a tested reputation for reliability, performance, security, and scalability. In contrast, Vignette’s installed software model is flawed (the same is true for any installed-software WCM vendor).

Sorry to put the kryptonite on the table but this is nothing more then a false statement. SaaS is just another way and not the ultimate super model for Content Management solutions out there, the implementation will not be 2 weeks as a result of the SaaS, it is not self building self migrating magic wand solution. And I am still waiting for the response of John Girard to Jon’s blog post to prove us wrong. SaaS does not indicate that 90% of the industry is wrong. It just offers an alternative to self hosted solutions and the ability to reduce the price tag that comes with its limitations (lack of SSO with AD, Blocking of the service to the internet and security will be the first to pop).
Vignette video was between versions! Now where did they came up with this one? Have they lost the rich media services release? They are trying to mix the news release on the purchase of Vidavee and the announcement of the video integration.

Vignette software can often take months or years to be
fully deployed and has proven to be very difficult and costly to update or upgrade. It also requires a
highly technical staff to maintain and manage.

Where is Quick Site? it is lower costing and very quick to implement take you less then a month end to end, have they forgot to mention that just for the sake of argument? or they are just padding their white paper with more misleading information? you will be the judge of that.

VCM lipstic on a pig.

Wow, that is low balling, i think they crossed the line of been reasonable at this point.
Sorry Clicability but i dont care how good your product is at this point. Spreading this kind of false negativism is just exposing the true nature of your company, i would rather do business with the pirates in Africa then with you guys, they seem more reliable. The worst thing that really caught me was the classification of the pdf as White Paper, seems to be a marketing paper to me. It’s a wolf in a sheep’s skin that is what it is.
V5 – V6 – V7 is a hard upgrade but aligning yourself in the V7 space makes the upgrade to next versions a simpler option.
One thing to remember is that Vignette is not just a WCM system as Clickability and is in the ECM space. Different space different clients different pace and different products that is all I have to say.
But if you are still thinking on Clickability as a valid solution after all they are spreading look at Jons post about the Snake Oil and ponder to yourself if moving technology to any provider may it be Vignette V7 or Clickability or even Fatwire is any different from each other and thus will take less time. My claim is simple, NO! You will spend similar amounts of time moving to V7 as you will to Clickability or Fatwire. You are changing the software and technology and will need to do a lot of data conversion.
I am thinking of the fatwire chivalry act and wondered if the way that clickability is migrating the clients also ties them down to some 3rd party service providers?
The customer of the V5/6 usually are from an era where ECM was not even coined, thus vary in size and can be small WCM customers who can suffice themselves with the open source solutions out there. Take a look at the choosing a CMS post for more information on how to choose a CMS not based the above false information.
May the cloud be with you!

as the announcement of the S-4 are here and the shareholders meeting is to be on the 21′st of July 2009, the future of Vignette seems brighter and brighter.
To all the sceptics out there, V8 is coming out soon and the way it looks and built i will be so happy to implement it. Who wants to be my first customer? Sign up in the comments section.
The latest Fatwire advertisement that we are shaky providores and the best bet is to go and use fatwire, promoting its free licenses if you do the move with them, is like a Venus fly trap, the lure is great but wait till you get inside as my friend Jon‚Äôs post a-fatwire-in-shining-armour discovers, you will soon realise that there are 3‚Äôrd party connections to tie you down and the fatman’s way might not be as safe and free as it is publicly stated.
On another note, customers thinking their legacy fatwire system is not up for the job i have enough experience to put you out of your misery. I have done that twice already and willing to do that again, now that is chivalry.
Oh and you only need VPS team no other dodgy 3rd party to do the trick.
For the question imposed by fatwire in their ad,

Are you with a vendor that can provide the right path forward for your business?

i will say this: No vendor can predict the unknown future, but i am sure as the sun rises in the east that the products in the market are not going to any dustbin soon, Binaricly speaking the answer is YES from all of my clients.

Moving to FatWire in more technical details, my take is that customers considering a Fatwire Solution could find it limited in capabilities, the WCM capabilities and volume/delivery abilities lack, to say the least, when compared to the vignette solutions.

And looking at the available solutions you will notice that FatWire have no suite of products to match every product or most of the products that Vignette offer and most of the customer have implemented.

As for switching the CMS in your organisation to a different vendor, it is not as switching your internet provider and only changing the ADSL connection details getting the same result immediately, it takes time to choose the matching product to the requirements (look at my previous post), building the web presence (usually customers take advantage of the investment and redesign their Ux and branding incurring more cost), getting the Business users up to speed with the new content management system and so on and so forth.
Its not that this is not achievable but it will cost you more then the licensing fee. i will say as a rule of thumb about twice all in all correct me if i am wrong.

Now back to the S-4, i am anxious to be at the 22′nd of July and to know how the merger is going to go ahead, it seems that exiting times are just around the corner and we are about to embark on a marvels journey when it comes to the new product line and the new products we will get exposed to from the OpenText side.
I am an ex sharepoint .Net Architect and will love to work on both sides of the technological trench again.
For those who are sceptic in my predictions there is a great interview audio with the CEO of OpenText, John Shackleton

To those who are curious what an S-4 stands for, this is a form that public companies have to file to give the facts around a Merger for the share holders.

Every one out there who wants to hear more about V8 listen closely tomorrow to the vignette wire!