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March 8, 1999

Easier Web Applications From The Bottom Up

Vignette tool and upgrade empower non-technical users

By Justin Hibbard

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ignette Corp. this week will introduce a development tool and an upgrade to its Web content-management server that it says will make Web application development easy enough for non-techies. By easing development, Vignette wants to cut the time and money it takes to launch Web sites on its server.

Vignette Development Center 4.2 lets users create templates for Web pages and link them to databases without writing code. The tool automatically generates database tables and schema in databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase. Users can manipulate database elements as visual objects and incorporate them into Web-page templates.

Modeling the data in databases and developing Web-page templates usually takes 20 to 30 weeks and costs about $1 million, Vignette says. The company says Development Center 4.2 will cut deployment costs by 10% to 40%. Most of the savings will come from turning over development duties to business users.

The National Association of Securities Dealers, which is moving the contents of its 20,000-page intranet into Vignette's StoryServer, plans to use Development Center 4.2. "Most of our content is from our communications people, who don't know how to program," says Jenna Farnham, Internet technology specialist at NASD. "If corporate communications had this drag-and-drop tool, they could build a lot of these templates themselves."

StoryServer 4.2 adds the Vignette Development Kit for Office, which lets companies use Microsoft Office apps to enter content into StoryServer. The upgrade also comes with programming interfaces for building a custom Web-browser interface for StoryServer's workflow system. "Our strategy is to unleash the power of the system to as many people as we can," says Bryan Jalowitz, application suite manager at Bank One Corp., a Chicago bank that uses StoryServer on its Web site.

Vignette Development Center 4.2 and StoryServer 4.2 will ship by the end of this month. Vignette Development Center is included with the StoryServer developer license; pricing starts at $5,000 per developer.