Vignette Corp. has announced the availability of new Vignette V6 adapters that enable organizations to integrate enterprise content created in Microsoft Office XP into customer, employee, and supplier Web sites and portals.

The V6 adapters do not require organizations to install additional software on each user's desktop or pay additional licensing fees for each user who contributes content. Instead, they enable workers to create content in an Office application, save it from the File menu, and publish it directly to the Vignette content management application. This non-intrusive approach helps ensure that content produced with Microsoft Office is easily integrated into the application, while allowing business users to create documents as they always have without new training. According to Vignette, other content management solutions require the addition of extra buttons, macros, or menus to each copy of Microsoft Office, resulting in increased training, maintenance, and administration costs.

With the V6 adapters, users and developers can leverage the enhanced support for XML tagging that's offered in Office XP products such as Microsoft Word and Excel. The flexibility provided by XML expands the reusability of content from these desktop applications to help ensure that business-user content is seamlessly integrated into other enterprise applications. In addition, when Microsoft Office content is saved to the Vignette content management application, the document attributes—such as look and feel, layout, and custom metadata—are maintained.

The adapters can also be used to pull information into Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Since Vignette V6 can access most internal or external systems or data sources—such as ERP and CRM applications, legacy systems, and databases—business users can retrieve information from these sources and add them to Word and Excel. Ultimately, this provides easy access to information and enables users to employ familiar tools such as Word for different kinds of publishing or, in the case of Excel, for analysis, decision support, and business reporting.

Vignette offers more than 50 content adapters for a variety of sources, including desktop authoring tools, XML, enterprise applications, content repositories, http, FTP, EDI, and RosettaNet. Integrations with Vignette adapters are created in a graphical design environment. In most cases no coding is required to deploy sophisticated content integration processes.

Source: Vignette Corp., Austin, TX, 888/608-9900; http://www.vignette.com.