RE: FN-FORUM Vignette Vs Spectra

date posted 27th July 2000 13:45

Silvano wrote:

> I know Vignette but I have only heard of Spectra.

I've done several substantive competitive analyses of the CMS space in the last 6 months - it's a very fast moving market

>
> Vignette is very scaleable (competes with Spectra, etc. on the smaller
> side
> and can be a Broadvision competitor in its largest implementations).

Kind of. The thing Spectra is very good at is being a one-stop-shop. It's all packaged together nicely (Broadvision is also good out of the box at rules based personalisation and their recent aquisition of Interleaf looks like bolstering their CMS capabilities).

Bear in mind that 'smaller' in this space is 250,000 pounds ballpark. Broadvision will cost you a million the moment they walk in the door.

>I
> doubt
> that the two are compatible in any way.
They're directly competiting products

>I think the way you manage
> content
> to achieve full personalisation (including generating different version
> of
> the same text)

The two are inextricably linked - if you're doing one to any kind of scale, you'll need the other or the work will kill you.

Vignette now includes NetPerceptions btw which is the recommendation engine which powers Amazon amongst others.

Spectra does quite a bit of personalisation, but also plugs into some of the muckle engines like Andromedia.

Both had a start in a comparatively tight development environment. Vignette started as a TCL-based CMS for news sites (they started with CNET), so if you could afford TCL developers (they're very few and *very* expensive) and were running a news service, you bought it. They've now realised that personalisation is also important, so have completely re-engineered it to be an entire suite of products.

Spectra is a ColdFusion application. CF has an enormous 3rd party developer community, and they're all learning Spectra right now.

However, both are moving towards app server agnosticism, principally JSP which is the way the big clients are all going, sticking fingers up to Microsoft as they go. Vignette is pretty much there already, so many people are choosing Vignette over Spectra for that reason (Spectra will take 12/18 months or so)

Both will run on sensible OS/database combinations (the usual one being Solaris/Oracle8).

Both have pretty good syndication services (although Spectra's is quite a bit stronger - WDDX is great)

Which would I choose? With an unlimited budget and an existing app server? Vignette. With a mere very large budget and a free hand on app server? Spectra.

You might also like to have a look at a fuller look at CMS which I produced some months back (the Vignette info is *very* out of date):
http://www.evolt.org/index.cfm?menu=8&cid=1449

So which way is NetDoctor going?

Cheers
Martin
(content management consultant who would normally charge an infeasibly large amount of cash for this)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL REMOVED]
> [EMAIL REMOVED] Behalf Of Smith Holburn
> Sent: 27 July 2000 11:35
> To: [EMAIL REMOVED]
> Subject: FN-FORUM Vignette Vs Spectra
>
> Hi
>
> Anyone familiar with the two content management
> systems above?
>
> What are the benefits of one over the other and if a
> partner uses Vignette would Spectra be compatible?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Vanessa Smith Holburn
> Content Consultant
> http://smithholburn.freelancers.net