With compliance widely acknowledged as a top priority for organisations across the globe, Vignette enables customers to implement solutions that easily capture and manage high volumes of documents, online transactions, records, and media assets, scaling to the needs of even the largest organisations. Vignette capabilities also allow organisations to automate verification of employee attestation of business processes, and to generate reporting dashboards to give officers and executives compliance information and peace of mind.

Although the compliance focus is internal control, companies should recognise the significant opportunity to make the financial business processes and systems both more consistent across the enterprise and more efficient. By adopting a broader view that encompasses consistency and efficiency in addition to compliance, companies can realise a significant business benefit that will, in many cases, offset the cost of compliance, noted Forrester Research in a September 25, 2003, report from entitled Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance: Look Internally for IT Building Blocks.

Vignette Compliance and Corporate Governance solutions are designed to help organisations meet government regulations to avoid sanctions or penalties while enhancing overall business efficiency. Vignette's long-standing leadership position in its support for industry standards make Vignette Compliance and Corporate Governance solutions well-suited for deploying and expanding initiatives in both homogeneous and heterogeneous IT environments.

Vignette will join with partners to offer six compliance and corporate governance solutions that are optimised to help organisations worldwide meet a variety of needs, including:

• Attestation for Sarbanes Oxley - Event-driven communication ensures consistency and reliability that enables organisations to quickly implement processes and controls. The solution manages and stores individual guarantees of adherence to business processes for audit purposes.
  
• E-mail Capture for Compliance and Risk Management - This solution enables organisations to capture, retain and dispose of records of e-mail communications automatically. The technology includes the ability to trigger business processes to follow up on potential policy violations.
  
• Comprehensive, Enterprise-Grade Records Management - Vignette provides a comprehensive framework for managing and securing documents from creation and capture through management, delivery and ultimate disposition. Vignette's records management capabilities also provide audit trails so organisations can reproduce records and access histories on demand.
  
• Capture Solution for Risk Management and Auditability of Web Transactions - Organisations can capture and store records of Web transactions and communications, which automatically enforces rules for document retention and disposition.
  
• Collaboration for Structured Filing Requirements and SEC Reporting - This Vignette solution offers flexible, secure workspaces for collaboration on filing and reporting documents. The workspace captures audit trails and records of collaborations for long-term retention and retrieval.
  
• Dashboard for Managing Content and Compliance Processes - Organisations can aggregate and manage cross-application and cross-functional content and business processes that route information for review and approval. This solution captures audit trails and publishes information as required by law.

The combination of TOWER Technology's document, records and imaging products with Vignette's market-leading content management, portal and collaboration offerings creates the world's only independent suite of information management and delivery applications based entirely on open standards. The modular suite helps customers increase productivity and accountability with real-time visibility and transparency into business processes. Unlike other compliance solutions, Vignette's enterprise capture technology handles paper records, electronic documents, scanned images and e-mail communications and manages the information through its complete lifecycle, from creation to destruction. (Vignette's fully integrated records and document management product has achieved the US Department of Defence 5015.2 certification.)

Yorkshire Water's customer services provider, Loop Customer Management Ltd, recognised that it would need to automate document management and workflow in order to meet the aggressive internal service levels required to attain a leading position within the utilities sector while also meeting target customer response standards set by water regulatory authorities. Using Vignette technology, Loop has automated processes for handling, storing and accessing details of customer contacts. The Vignette system holds details of over 16 million cases. "We now guarantee that incoming correspondence will receive a full, substantive response within five working days," said Paul Tasker, head of business solutions at loop. "In fact, well over 90% of correspondence receives a response within two working days and significant numbers have a response returned on the same day that we received the correspondence from the customer. This would be impossible if we were not able to use the Vignette system to manage intelligent electronic documents."

"While organisations may initially take a reactive posture on compliance, Vignette customers increasingly see the opportunity to leverage compliance investments to significantly improve business processes and integrity to achieve both short-term and long-term benefits," said David Shirk, senior vice president of products, strategy and worldwide marketing at Vignette. "With the acquisition of TOWER Technology, we have assembled an impressive set of solutions that not only helps organisations rapidly adhere to regulatory compliance, but helps them gain a better understanding of their business and positively impact organisational efficiency."

The acquisition of TOWER Technology furthers Vignette's commitment to help organisations consolidate IT spending and minimise the number of vendors with which they work. By leveraging integrated capabilities for information management and delivery from a single vendor, organisations are able to reduce costs, deployment times and vendor risk as they build out compliance processes. Vignette's open architecture and pre-built adapters allow customers to leverage and extend existing applications and information, without vendor or platform lock-in, to bring together the right operational data for compliance and business efficiency initiatives.