Decking Out Barbie

My manager wants me to do a cost benefit analysis of five or six content management products that work with Vignette (yes, they sold us this rather expensive little Barbie and now want to talk us into some nifty scuba-gear for her as well aka the Vignette Content Management solution) The business users are whining en-masse about all that they cannot do because of us retards in IT even as we scramble to pick the right tool.

There are tons of open-source products out there that would serve our purpose equally well and save us a neat pile of money to boot. The techie on my team has done good amount of legwork and narrowed to the field to about ten products.

Reading around this afternoon , I ran into something Philip Greenspun had written in 1997 which is still a fair summary of our gripes with Vignette. My experience dealing with their technical support was "surreal" too.

"Vignette's StoryServer product does not do any of the things that their marketing literature claims it does. It is not a content management system. It is not a version control system. It is not a personalization system. The only sense in which it might be any of these things is that a programmer could use it to build one of these things. However, you could say the same thing about the raw Unix operating system plus a C compiler. Sitting through a meeting with them was for me a rather surreal experience. It would be rather akin to hearing Adobe pitch PhotoShop as a payroll check processing system."