Although the entire process of creating a workspace and setting up workflow was easy, navigating the system took time and end users will need training.
Vignette Business Collaboration Server 5.6.3. Vignette Corp., (888) 608-9900, (512) 741-4300. www.vignette.com
Hummingbird was not far behind our leaders, but its high price kept it from the top. It has excellent documenting features, including checkout/in, workflow and versioning, and comes with a portal for easy navigation.
HEC is a Web application that works on top of Hummingbird's Core Services (J2EE environment) and works with Hummingbird's Vorlon Web server. It can run as a standalone application or in a cluster of servers supporting Hummingbird Core Services. Collaboration is the main application; ConfigCollaboration is a servlet used to configure it. HEC supports multiple relational databases to manage metadata and uses local and network file stores for documents and data.
HEC organizes communities or workspaces within organizations. We created an organization to match the server under test and then created roles, groups and users. When we logged into the portal for the first time, a wizard helped us set user-interface defaults and enable system features, including IM. After the desktop installation, we warmed right up to the Jabber technology. It provided a secure SSL connection to the server and presence management. HEC also comes with an internal messaging service to send and receive messages and notifications within the system. However, it doesn't provide a utility for sending external e-mail to workspaces.
