We have had an ASP.Net / SQL Server approach to our web site for many years and it's served us quite well. We recently moved to DNN for the content management elements but we are increasingly interested in its user and vendor management capabilities. Specifically, we need to determine whether we should start leveraging DNN user and profile objects fully or whether the current "home grown" code/SQL remains our best bet.

Our needs are pretty simple. We want to support thousands of registered users, segment them into roles that they choose when they register, send them eMail-based newsletters, provide them with access to forums, expose personalised content on oure web site (based on their roles), do the same for our blog and so on.

Similarly, we have custom code for vendor management (we have a database of 5,000 opt-in vendors that we expose to our visitors through filters, etc). We want to support vendors securely managing their own profiles, want to sell ad space in selected area of our site and have "featured vendors" who have some other properties based on their location which "elevate" their listing.

I am interested in the degree to which others have truly embraced DNN as not just a CMS but also a repository for their registered users and vendors. The vision, of course, is that by collecting this information within the platform we can then use DNN and 3rd party modules that leverage a common set of roles.

In terms of scaling, we need to support 10's of thousands of user and vendors, all "self managing" in terms of their profiles. We also want the ability to drill down and build our own queries. I assume this is just a matter of understanding the DNN schema.

I'm interested to know how real this vision is in reality. I am particularly interested in live sites that have achieved this.

Thoughts?

Thanks.

All of this is totally doable inside dnn. But its not something it does out of the box - there would be some work involved creating modules to meet your task requrements.

Westa