After more than 3 years since it released a successor to Version 6 of its CMS, Vignette has upgraded its own public website. Vignette.com now runs Vignette Portal, backed by the company's V7 Content Management (VCM) product. The graphical refresh is very nice. And good riddance to the old 0,2097,1-1-2049,00.html-style URLs, but what of the replacements? As Enterprise Portals Report readers know, portal URLs can get very ugly. Consider this URL to Vignette's main solutions page:
http://www.vignette.com/portal/site/us/
menuitem.c133f2f75f8cf1e8fb3d8010180141a0/;
jsessionid=FYGXQS9x63LfLHNcmR95gcLF0J2rJpt
5LvD4h95tSTdBJmpdcX2w!167006469,
with its ungainly content GUID and the downright perilous session ID, which makes URLs perishable and potentially search-engine unfriendly. To be fair, the implementation does not always generate a session ID, and Vignette Portal has work-arounds that can put forward friendlier URLs, but until then, this dog food is kind of hard to digest...