Collaboration
First-generation end-user collaboration technologies like blogs, wikis and forums, for all of their crudeness and limitations, have demonstrated the appetite the public has for online community and participation. As organizations evolve their responses to these appetites, the limitations of first-generation technologies become obvious very quickly.
For example, as organizations progress beyond accepting comments or advice to fully engaging customers in product innovation or other business processes, they’ll need to integrate these channels with internal business processes for any idea to succeed. They’ll need full auditability of all online transactions to protect themselves from litigation. They’ll need enterprise levels of security, search and intelligence. And as organizations invite virtually the entire globe to collaborate at their online presence, they will need scalability, authentication and other forms of control.
Breaking the limiting bonds of the wiki and blog form will also require a much more flexible platform, one that can support virtually any interface, any content type, from any device, and which is easily integrated into the business tools that are used every day.
As organizations consider how to address their next-generation social computing requirements, some understand the value in hosting the same collaborative environments inside the organization. Creative, customer service and merchandizing teams evolving customer-focused content—and evaluating customer-generated content—require the same support for process integration, auditability, security, search and flexibility.
Few organizations will want to create technical or other barriers between their external platforms for engaging customer involvement and their internal platforms for engaging employee and partner involvement. Such a seamless collaborative environment gives organizations unprecedented ability to understand and manage how content is delivered and consumed by their customers, which in turn assists them in their ongoing internal content creation and evaluation processes. The result is a collaborative environment among customers, employees and partners, an engaging and interactive environment where information and ideas propagate freely.
Vignette Collaboration Products
Vignette Collaboration provides Web-based, shared workspaces that blend seamlessly with such familiar productivity tools as e-mail, desktop document folders, productivity applications and calendaring tools.
Vignette Strategic Account Management enables knowledge sharing among distributed account teams to enhance sales efficiency and improve customer relationships, reduce communication cycle times and sales costs, and capture valuable account and opportunity communications.
Vignette Project Delivery helps program and project managers to streamline the work and management of project teams over widely dispersed geographies, including representatives from many departments as well as outside contractors and suppliers.
