Altadis Group Selects Vignette Application Portal to Power Company Intranet.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 17, 2004

Leading Tobacco Company Deploys Vignette Technology to Consolidate

Infrastructure and Manage New Corporate Identity

Vignette Corp. (Nasdaq:VIGN) today announced that Altadis Group, one of Europe's leading tobacco companies, has selected Vignette's portal solution for its new multilingual intranet. The initiative will provide Altadis Group employees with a central information resource following the merger of Seita and Tabacalera in 1999, enabling better knowledge sharing and allowing more efficient decision-making in real time.

After the merger between market-leading companies Seita and Tabacalera took place, the Altadis Group became a multicultural organization with 20,000 employees in nearly 35 countries. Altadis has now invested in a consolidated Vignette-powered intranet to help build a common culture and identity and a rationalized product set to respond to growth potential. The portal will also consolidate disparate systems and applications from the two merged companies.

"With such a heterogeneous environment, the intranet represented an abstraction layer which would enable us to create consistency. We quickly realized that we could go beyond having just a communication tool by extending the portal to business applications," said Jean-Pierre Verdier, intranet project manager at Altadis. "In order to do so, we were looking for a best-of-breed solution based on open standards which would enable us to quickly integrate the group's applications and to publish a variety of content to attract employees to the intranet. The objective was to encourage information sharing, decentralized publication and capacity to easily manage multilingual content."

Altadis Group selected the Vignette Application Portal solution because of its commitment to standards and its user-friendly administration interface enabling easy management of user profiles and roles. In addition, personalized presentation allows the portal to display the documents that particular users have the right to access depending on their profile and role, and presents information in the user's first language (French, Spanish or English).

"The excellent integration with the content management back office, the fast deployment and the easy configuration process particularly attracted us," said Jean-Michel Lasne, intranet project manager at Altadis. "Moreover, to ensure support from the Altadis employees, who were sometimes not very familiar with the Internet environment, we selected the Vignette portal platform because of its user-friendly interface for the user."

The intranet provides employee access to more than 600 content areas containing more than 4,000 documents, with about 100 additional documents being added per month. The intranet has been in production since early 2003, when it began with 300 users, and it has grown steadily to its current level of 3,500 registered users. The volume of content is expected to continue to grow as well.

"We are seeing a definite return on investment, and what we have learned from this type of project will help us save time for upcoming initiatives," Lasne said. "Thanks to the implementation of Vignette Application Portal, we are getting a qualitative return on optimization of our processes, an improved communication system and an infrastructure that enables us to put information at everyone's disposal. This also generates paper savings and protects the network bandwidth by avoiding the intensive usage of the messaging system."

Altadis Group also plans to install kiosks in factories to enable access to in-house information for all employees; access to the intranet will also be extended to group subsidiaries and remote workers. In addition, the group plans to integrate new business applications such as SAP and human resources.

About Altadis

The Altadis Group, which was created through the merger of Seita and Tabacalera, is one of the leading European tobacco companies as well as a leader in the wholesale distribution sector. With 20,000 employees and activities in nearly 35 countries, Altadis is a multicultural, internationally orientated group, generating more than a third of sales from foreign markets. Underpinned by a solid financial position, Altadis is pursuing a growth strategy based on acquisitions and international expansion in order to reinforce its leadership position and create value for its shareholders and employees. Altadis is listed on the Paris and Madrid stock exchanges.

About Vignette

Vignette's software and expertise help organizations harness the power of information and the Web for measurable improvements in business efficiency. As the efficiency experts, Vignette (Nasdaq:VIGN) helps organizations increase productivity, reduce costs, improve user experiences and manage risk. Vignette's intranet, extranet and Internet solutions incorporate portal, integration, enterprise content management and collaboration capabilities that can rapidly deliver unique advantages through an open, scalable and adaptable architecture that integrates with legacy systems. Vignette is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with local operations worldwide. Visit http://www.vignette.com/ to see how Vignette customers achieve measurable improvements in business efficiency and to find out why more companies prefer Vignette.

Forward-Looking Statements 

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