Vignette Votes to Ratify Web Services for Remote Portlets Standard; Vignette Reaffirms Support of Leading Industry Standards.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 5, 2003

Vignette Corp. (Nasdaq:VIGN) this week affirmed its long-standing support of industry standards by casting a favorable vote to ratify the Web Services for Remote Portlets standard (WSRP) 1.0 specification created under the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). Vignette, a founding member of OASIS' WSRP technical committee, is a leading proponent of open standards. Vignette is one of the first content management and portal vendors to drive innovation and usage of Web services within enterprise Web applications, helping customers reduce the complexity and cost of sharing information and content across and between organizations.

Vignette has pioneered efforts in standards-based portlet development and deployment, successfully shipping portal software to support these kinds of development efforts as early as 2000. As a founding member of numerous technical committees, Vignette remains a driving force in the development of a variety of portal-computing standards.

"Our market leadership position is a direct result of our ability to give customers a sustainable competitive edge," said Dave Shirk, senior vice president of product strategy and marketing at Vignette. "By working actively to define and promote open standards, we give customers maximum flexibility and the opportunity to reduce complexity while speeding deployment and time to benefit."

"The ratification of the WSRP standard is an affirmation of the efforts Vignette has made over the past two years to bring the concept of remotely hosted portlets to fruition," said Ed Anuff, vice president of strategy at Vignette, one of the creators of WSUI, a precursor to WSRP. "Standards-based portlet interoperability has finally matured."

"The Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) group is comprised of a powerful group of providers. WSRP is, among other things, an avenue to interoperate between .NET-based portal elements -- namely Web Parts, Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server -- and Java elements. WSRP effectively wraps standardized portlets as visual Web services, which can be deployed or invoked independently of location," said Jim Murphy, senior research analyst with AMR Research Inc.

"The WSRP standard is designed to enable a `plug-and-play' structure for diverse user-facing Web applications, including portals," Shirk said. "Vignette is moving aggressively in product development to give our customers early access to the benefit of the standard."

Vignette support for WSRP will be realized through a set of features built into Vignette(R) Application Portal and Vignette(R) Application Builder that are designed to publish, consume and manage remote Web services as portlets within the Vignette portal administration framework. Vignette Application Portal support for WSRP will allow organizations to easily subscribe to compliant Web services, provision those services for any number of portals and deliver visual, user-facing portlets to end users. Vignette Application Builder support for WSRP will allow organizations to produce customized portal applications that take advantage of existing enterprise application data and can be consumed by any compliant portal server.

Now that the WSRP standard has been formally ratified, Vignette expects to deliver beta-level support for WSRP consumption in its Vignette Application Portal during the second half of 2003. In the first half of 2004, Vignette expects to continue with support for WSRP consumption and publishing in Vignette Application Portal and Vignette Application Builder.

In addition to its work with OASIS to drive the definition of WSRP, Vignette is providing its technical expertise to the Java Specification Requirements (JSR) process, in a concerted effort to define a Java-based standard of portlet interoperability, known as JSR 168, and bidirectional access for content through JSR 170.

The Vignette(R) V7 family of products includes comprehensive support for industry standards today, including these:

-- Use of XML throughout the entire content management, portal

and integration product lines, as well as in the extensible

Vignette V7 architecture

-- Use of Web Services for information and application

integration, including support for Web Services Description

Language (WSDL) and Universal Description, Discovery and

Integration (UDDI). Web Services also are leveraged as a

service for the development and delivery of composite

applications.

-- Native support of J2EE throughout the Vignette V7 portfolio of

content management, portal and integration products, including

Java Message Service (JMS) for messaging and guaranteed

delivery -- a capability unique in the industry today

-- Continuation of Vignette's long-standing commitment to support

established industry standards including .NET, Simple Object

Access Protocol (SOAP), Java, Extensible Markup Language 

(XML), Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), Wireless Markup

Language (WML), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)

and Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI).

About Vignette Corp.

Vignette (Nasdaq:VIGN) enables enterprises to achieve real-time advantage by rapidly building, deploying and optimizing enterprise Web applications. Vignette powers the Web applications of more than 1,600 leading organizations and is headquartered in Austin, Texas. Vignette has offices located throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia and in Australia, and can be found on the Web at http://www.vignette.com/.

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