The World Beyond Content ManagementThe World Beyond Content Management

Vignette Corp. is supplying the latest evidence that the lines are blurring among applications used to manage, deploy, present, and use content. The vendor last week unveiled its updated content-management platform, dubbed V7, which will be available later this year. But CEO Tom Hogan says Vignette will bring document-management, E-learning, E-marketing, collaboration, and portal applications to market during the next 12 months.

The question is whether Vignette's customers -- or those of portal vendor Plumtree Software Inc., which earlier this month unveiled a similarly expanded strategy -- will buy the vendor's approach to the converging market for content tools. "All of the content-software specialists are gearing up for the next round of competition, which will center around the deployment of Web-based collaborative-business applications," Delphi Group analyst Hadley Reynolds says.

Vignette also is introducing an application framework based on Java 2 Enterprise Edition that will let developers build J2EE or .Net-compliant software, and it's providing more centralized management capabilities to make it easier for line managers to oversee a greater range of content. That's also due later this year. The vendor has lowered V7's entry-level price to $125,000.