Vignette Corp. today announced that its suite of content management, integration and analysis applications now ships with support for enterprise Java technology.

The Austin, Texas-based company last year redesigned its software to add support for the Java and Microsoft Corp. development environments. Before that, Vignette had promoted the Tool Command Language (Tcl) scripting language.

Erik Josowitz, Vignette's vice president of corporate strategy, said customers wanted the company to upgrade its products to support Java and Microsoft technology.

"They're making architectural decisions as to what their IT infrastructure is going to look like in this next generation of applications that are being rolled out," Josowitz said. "Their IT infrastructure is going to center around these enterprise standards -- on the Java side, J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition], and on the Microsoft side, COM+."

Support for COM+ came last summer, and initial Java support quietly followed at the end of the year, Josowitz said.

Vignette also announced today that its suite of products not only natively supports the J2EE development environment, but also supports two of the top application servers -- BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic and IBM's WebSphere.

"The big value is that Vignette is moving away from Tcl," said Victor Votsch, an analyst at Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Conn. Corporate users need to standardize on the Java or Microsoft development environment so they can better utilize staff and skills, he said.

Shawn Willett, an analyst at Current Analysis Inc. in Sterling, Va., said Vignette's chief competitor, Broadvision, has also moved to support Java in response to corporate demand.

"I think a lot of corporate buyers have put directives in place that everything has to run on Java or COM," Willett said. "People have been burned by proprietary software."

Also today, Vignette announced two enhancements to its flagship product, Vignette Content Management Server (CMS). The CMS Explorer knits the system into the Windows Explorer desktop, and the Content Manager Generator automatically generates code for common development tasks.

In related content management news, NCompass Labs Inc. in Vancouver, British Columbia, soon plans to unveil the 4.0 version of its Resolution flagship product and an add-on, called Content Connector for Microsoft Commerce Server 2000. The add-on embeds content management capability into the Microsoft product, company officials said.

"This has been a weakness in the Microsoft product, so there's definitely a need for third-party content management," said Willett.

Resolution Version 4.0 will be available March 27, with the Content Connector for Commerce Server 2000 add-on to follow a few days later, company officials said. Pricing for Resolution starts at $59,000; Content Connector sells for $10,000.

» posted by ITworld staff

Computerworld

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