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Tony Byrne

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Skeptical about DotNetNuke getting enterprisey

20-Aug-2010

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Web Content and Experience Management, Open Source, Selecting Technology, Vendor Viability & Financials, DotNetNuke

Many observers expected big things when DotNetNuke Corporation raised serious venture capital in November, 2008. (DotNetNuke Corporation is the commercial entity behind the sprawling, open source CMS community by the same name -- usually shortened to "DNN.")  At that time, DNN's core codebase was aging, and larger enterprises tended to find the platform -- let alone the broader ecosystem -- too messy to adopt.

Since then, developments have been comparatively slow. It seems DNN Corporation has taken the Alfresco route: focusing on support packages while building various commercial add-ons to the community edition.

Earlier this week, DNN Corporation announced an "Enterprise Edition." This new edition gives you a staging platform to make content and code changes, which you can then push into production. That's standard-issue for higher-end systems, but can still get tricky, and we always encourage customers to test such synchronization services very carefully.

To be sure, DNN's popularity proves there's a place for omnibus CMS products, especially when you need something easy to deploy. Joomla! is another great example, from the PHP world. We call these "simple products:" if you select the right modules and well-tested skins, you can apply a wide range of canned web applications to a single site.

From there, they will both start falling off.  Neither DNN nor Joomla! natively provides effective multi-site management.  Think twice about employing them as serious application development platforms, and if you're looking for technical elegance, I recommend casting your gaze elsewhere.

So it comes down to scenarios and fit. In our Web CMS technology evaluations, we cite DNN as potentially a good fit for two of twelve scenarios, and a plausible fit for three more. DNN's new staging feature is unlikely to change that. Then again, you don't want to invest a system that tries to be all things to all customers.