Datasheet: Vignette Collaboration

Vignette Collaboration
Vignette Collaboration is a flexible collaboration solution that is easily tailored to your specific business challenges. By combining the best collaboration and information management technologies, Vignette Collaboration enables you and your colleagues to collaborate in secure online workspaces, using e-mail, Web browsers and desktop applications to increase productivity, make more informed decisions, and improve your crucial business relationships.

Overview
For ten years Vignette has shown organizations worldwide how to transform their content from a liability to an asset. Vignettes enterprise content management (ECM) solutions help these organizations harness the power of their records, documents, Web pages, images, e-mails, multimedia and other unstructured content to create new opportunities, expand profits, and realize greater savings and efficiencies. 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 methods 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 individuals departure from your organization. Vignette Collaboration offers you the ability to enhance the methods in use today with out-of-the-box, shared online workspaces (See Figure 1). These flexible workspaces capture 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 enhancing these 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.

Figure 1: Example of a community home page.

Features
Team Workspaces

Benefits
Enables you to quickly create shared, online workspaces that are tailored to your business. To help ensure their availability when needed, these workspaces can be easily accessed by different interfaces (online and offline) and integrated into other business applications. These workspaces offer complete collaborative features including threaded discussions, calendaring, tasks, subscriptions, notifications, dashboards, and search to address widely varying needs. You can mix and match any of these features with the Workspace Template Creation Wizard in order to deliver the exact solution necessary to reach your goals. Eases the creation and approval of final documents with features like document versioning, document check-in and checkout, workflow, robust security and access controls, and powerful search and index functionality. Authors, reviewers, editors and approvers receive e-mail notifications to let them know when a document needs their attention.

Collaborative Authoring

Knowledge Management

Combines full-text search (See Figure 2) and relational query capabilities, stores and presents information in the right business context, and utilizes knowledge agents that make Vignette Collaboration invaluable for leveraging corporate knowledge to complete work faster and easier. Vignette Collaboration is designed and built for large numbers of users and supports collaboration inside and outside your company. And with full support for UTF8, your international colleagues and business partners can collaborate and manage documents in any language worldwide. Simplifies usability by enabling you to perform many collaborative functions through e-mail. From your e-mail, you can quickly search and contribute content, check-in and checkout content, comment on documents, and participate in approval workflows. You can also launch chat sessions directly from a workspace. Vignette Collaborations native integration with Microsoft Live Communications Server boosts the power of your workspaces by adding features such as chat, white-boarding, and online meetings. Helps you quickly identify subject matter experts through skills-based, topical or text searches on information contained within the workspaces. With this feature you can rapidly locate subject experts that communicate often on a specific subject. Vignette Collaboration makes it easy to then communicate with the expert through channels such as discussions, chat, and e-mail. Supports large deployments through high availability, clustering, and scalability up to multiple millions of documents and objects. Vignette Collaboration is a J2EE-based application that supports protocols and open standards such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, LDAP, WebDAV, and XML.

E-mail and Instant Messaging Integration

Expert Identification

Enterprise Architecture

Integrate Collaboration into Your Existing Work Habits

You have invested considerable time learning and becoming accustomed to using your desktop applications to accomplish your tasks. You might even spend the majority of your day in productivity applications, e-mail applications, and instant messaging programs. Vignette Collaboration facilitates your continued use these applications (See Figure 3) while adding powerful collaborative features in the out-of-the-box shared, online workspaces. For example, Vignette Collaboration provides the ability to drag-and-drop documents from the desktop to the workspace and vice versa, as well as the ability to view workspaces as Web folders. With these features you can continue to work in the applications you know and prefer, while benefiting from the value of the collaborative workspace. In addition to productivity applications, Vignette Collaboration integrates well with your e-mail. You can participate in conversations, upload and download files, check-in and version documents, retrieve documents, and search the workspace, all without the user leaving your e-mail client. If you prefer to use instant messaging, Vignette Collaboration offers you the ability to launch instant messaging sessions directly from a workspace.
Figure 3: Example of saving a file directly from a productivity application into a community workspace.

Figure 2: Search results are returned in context. Search can be saved, or set as agents. Figure 4: Example of Instant Messaging integrated with a workspace. Notice the presence indication and the icon next to Michael Brown.

Improve Knowledge Re-use and Delivery

In many organizations, large amounts of valuable information end up locked in application silos, groupware applications, and instant messaging logs, and therefore cannot be leveraged for future benefit of other members of your organization. With Vignette Collaboration, you can use shared, online workspaces to capture this critical, valuable information for reuse. As you collaborate and communicate through the workspace, the communications (e-mail, chat, etc), information, documents and intellectual property are gathered in a Group Memory where they can later be searched and re-used. Vignette Collaboration establishes an intuitive organizational structure for your collaboration and information sharing environment, and makes it possible to search across workspaces - subject to access policies - in order to maximize knowledge transfer and re-use. And with the ability to subscribe to searches, you have a way to learn from and keep informed of other peoples work (See Figure 5).

and business at hand. These feature groupings have been fine-tuned using Vignettes experience with over 500 field implementations. By using these groups, you can quickly launch workspaces as well as save valuable resources since custom development is not required. In the event your future requirements grow beyond the scope of the out-of-the-box offerings, you can customize the out-of-the-box templates as well as build custom workspaces.

Figure 6: Vignette Collaboration enables you to create as many communities as you need.

Summary
Vignette Collaboration is part of an integrated family of ECM products. With these products, Vignettes customers increase their productivity, reduce their costs, manage their risk, and improve their interactions with key constituents.
Figure 5: Subscriptions and notifications keep you current on important documents and events.

Simple, Rapid Workspace Creation

DS0106_Collaboration

Vignette Collaboration includes pre-configured groups of features that you can use to quickly create collaborative workspaces (See Figure 6) that align with your processes

Vignette Collaboration is an extremely flexible collaboration solution that can be easily configured to meet your specific business challenges. It provides you with comprehensive, out-of-the-box workspace templates that make it easy for you to quickly and securely share information and communicate in shared, interactive online workspaces. Using Vignette Collaboration helps you increase productivity, helps you make more informed decisions, and helps you improve your crucial business relationships. For more information about Vignettes 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 1301 South MoPac Expressway

Vignette Latin America

Vignette Europe/Middle-East/Africa 44.1628.77.2000 Tel 44.1628.77.2266 Fax [email protected]

Vignette Asia-Pacific 61.2.9455.5000 Tel 61.2.9455.5200 Fax [email protected]

Suite 100 305.789.6603 Tel Austin, TX 78746-5776 305.789.6612 Fax 512.741.4300 Tel 512.741.4500 Fax 888.608.9900 Toll-Free E-mail [email protected] [email protected]

Publication Date: January 2006. Vignette does not warrant, guarantee, or make representations concerning the contents of this document. All information is provided AS-IS, without express or implied warranties of any kind including, without limitation, the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, quality and title. Any information provided by Vignette customers or partners was obtained after the implementation of Vignette software and may have changed as of the Publication Date. You may not achieve the same results or benefits from using Vignette as described in this document. Nothing in this document is considered to be part of any product documentation or specification for any purpose. Features and functionalities of Vignette software may be licensed in one or more separately priced software programs or modules. Vignette reserves the right to change the contents of this document and the features or functionalities of its products and services at any time without obligation to notify anyone of such changes. Copyright 2006 Vignette Corporation. All rights reserved. Vignette, the V Logo, e:fficiency and e:fficiency experts are trademarks or registered trademarks of Vignette Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other company, product and service names, and brands are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.