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HomeHomeOur CommunityOur CommunityGeneral Discuss...General Discuss...'sell' me on DNN...what should I be looking at?
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2/13/2008 6:56 AM
 

Hi,

Some comments really.....

1) Often I see Sharepoint as costing loads of $$$$, but this depends on whether you use MOSS 2007 as opposed to WSS which is free with Windows 2003 server. OK it does not do as much, but you may not want as much.....

2) I have had this discussion with a number of peers, and the general feeling is that companies are going with Sharepoint for intranet apps to make use of their Windows server resources.... and DNN for internet apps....

3) I prefer DNN's smaller footprint.... Sharepoint tends to require lots of extra components.... whereas DNN is much more straightforward.

4) I have an outstanding concern with DNN and it may be not only DNN and that is speed.... To date you cannot natively compile dlls etc.... Sometimes I wish this site  was a tad more responsive especially the forums.... Using hardware as the solution may not be the best answer especially when the software could be streamlined perhaps with native compilation.

5) I think DNN's functionality is great.... and I view it as a framework which can be use to build apps.... by using modules or ASP.NET ASCXs. But for this to work and be acceptable then 4) has be OK.... In my opinion perfomance can never be underestimated since this is something that users always experiences and will use to judge very quickly the net worth of an app.

6) I have been posting on about accessibility and section 508... Not an interesting subject, but an important subject since in many parts of the world it is now law, and a framework like DNN should comply with this out of the box.... I would like to see a statement on this from the DNN team....

I like DNN, but there are questions..... and I am sure there are isuues with other CMSs......

Good luck,

Sam

 
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2/13/2008 10:32 AM
 

What has been mentioned here in this thread seems to playing into our world at work as well.  Our intranet (which we currently use DNN for) has gone through a few phases over the years starting with a dirty home-grown app (before my time).  They moved from that to a 3rd party one called EAS, then moved from that to one called Passageways (they moved to this one just before I started).  Between the high cost and poor support and extensibility of Passageways, I bided my time until I felt that I had enough clout to start suggesting alternatives.  So, we went down that path again.  We evaluated possibly building our own or using a multitude of options out there.  I had just come from a job where we used WSS1.0 to spawn off a few sites for some clients and so I had a very bitter taste in my mouth for Sharepoint, so I didn't even consider it an option.

Long story short we settled on DNN because of the vast community, relative extensibility in skinning and programming, and the cost -- free framework, inexpensive modules, fairly easy to develop modules for.  We have been using DNN in production since May of 2007 though we started our development and testing phase in October or November of 2006.  It has been a great move for us and we service rougly 15000 requests per day; our portal contains approximately 600 tabs, 60+ security roles (which is how we handle "department" sites -- we create a base page that has the rights to create/edit and then anybody with security to that page can spawn children pages and modules to them).

However... the powers that be have recently started stirring the pot and we are now going to start evaluating MOSS for our intranet.  We belong to a Microsoft volume licensing package and already pay out the bum for it and since MOSS is included in our license, they want to actually use it.  As I type this they are setting up some servers in VM for me to create a test site on and start evaluating it against our needs.

One thing that I've seen on the thread here and definitely agree with is that DNN == internet presence; MOSS == intranet presence.  While either can be used for intranet or internet, it seems that you get the most power and functionality out of MOSS with its Office integration and very tight (and good) integration with AD.  DotNetNuke has AD integration (I haven't looked at the new stuff, so my opinion here is based on older stuff) but I think it is mediocre at best.  Office integration exists only when/if somebody writes a module to do it, but frankly anything out there pales in comparison to Microsoft integrating with their own stuff.

With ASP.NET 2.0, Sharepoint became a heck of a lot easier to develop and skin.  They used to say that you couldn't reskin a WSS1.0 site... I've learned that you can but it was a pain in the bum.  I'd provide examples here of sites I DID reskin in WSS1.0 but the company I worked for no longer exists and, as such, the sites have been migrated from WSS and are hosted elsewhere (so the point is moot).  Anyway, masterpages were an excellent introduction into ASP.NET 2.0 and Sharepoint leverages that technology wonderfully.  Web parts in WSS1.0/1.1 were crap.  They were such a pain to do ANYTHING with so we ended up cheating and using a third party component which allowed us to host ASCX in a web part (I believe it was called smarttools or something like that), much like DNN.  However, since Sharepoint was rebuilt from the ground up with WSS2 to support ASP.NET 2.0, their whole model actually works now.  You can create your Web Parts in Visual Studio a heck of a lot easier now and the CAS isn't such a crap.

On the flipside, DNN's way of deploying modules is 100x better than Sharepoint is.  Zip up my package and upload it, voila!  Sharepoint is a bit trickier but by virtue of that trickery it is also much more secure.  Lets face it, anybody can create a module for DNN and provide it for free and drive traffic to it, but then have it one massive trojan.  The code is there and very easy to pull all sorts of information out of DNN using a module, then easily email it somewhere or do whatever you want with it.  Scary?  Sharepoint webparts are rarely free and typically have some pretty big players supporting them, so it is easy to trust them when installing them. 

DNN modules are typically less than $200, though about 90% of them out there are crap.  Sharepoint web parts are rarely less than $500 but they are very well developed and well supported, just a lot less to choose from.

A HUGE selling point for DNN is the community.  Sharepoint has a community but (this is based on my experience with WSS1) it is not very responsive or helpful.  The DNN community will generally answer your questions if they are well-formulated and well-placed, not to mention the sheer size of it.  Is it well organized?  No, but it is getting there.

DNN support -- if you want to pay for it you get it from the source or from other trusted members of the community (such as Mitchel Sellers).  Microsoft support -- you get to call, wait in line, and then talk to somebody in India that you struggle to understand what the heck they are saying for half the call, then the other half the call trying to get them to understand what you are saying and prove that the problem you are describing really does exist and is well documented on the internet, you are just trying to get them to help you resolve it, end up getting escalated to somebody that natively speaks English (somebody out of Redmond finally), and they solve your problem in 5 minutes (true story, not with Sharepoint though).

Hopefully that gives you a little bit of insight into each side of the story.


-- Jon Seeley
DotNetNuke Modules
Custom DotNetNuke and .NET Development
http://www.seeleyware.com
 
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2/13/2008 1:36 PM
 

Fooberichu,

What an excellent post...... How very insightful.... It is great to read how it is in real life...

It is interesting to read that it looks like management will force Sharepoint back onto you..... and I think this is a very typical trend..... From an intranet perspective the Office integration is always the killer functionality... although I have seen some modules with Webdav which may help DNN in this regard. But seriously I would think it would take a brave IT head to choose DNN instead of Sharepoint..... to run on Windows Server.... It is a little like choosing MYSQL rather than SQL Server.....

From a freelance consulting perspective I would be stupid to ignore Sharepoint since it is part of the MS infrastructural stack....

I see that you ran DNN in a pretty big way..... How did you find the performance?

Thanks again for the wonderful post....

Sam

 
New Post
2/14/2008 12:02 AM
 

Performance on our DNN site is great, but we have some pretty heavy hardware to throw at it.  Here is a thread where I described our deployment: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/118/threadid/140927/scope/posts/Default.aspx

In a nutshell, we are running our server on VMWare with some hefty hardware in the backend and some dedicated resources in the VM appliance itself.  DNN is the only application I have running on that VM so it doesn't need to worry about any other software interfering with it (memory or CPU usage).  We are possibly going to webfarm it in the next week or so -- not because we need to for performance, but because we want to for redundancy.  If we do that, we'll pull the data directory from the computer it is on and move it to a file server and then create some IIS virtual directories using the UNC path to the network location, then have the hardware switches (can't remember what the IT guy called it, maybe he just called it a hardware load balancer) round robin requests and force sessions to stay on the server it hits (that way we don't have to worry about session getting screwed with).

As for management forcing Sharepoint on us... yeah.  The CIO himself came down (who used to be in the IT department as the network admin, so he has a very firm understanding of how things work down there) and said "look, we have the Microsoft volume licensing package which includes ANY version of Sharepoint we want, it has all the office integration, etc, why don't we look into using it."  Here's the deal, even if we do decide to go that route (I'm at least playing like it is a choice right now although in reality I think they have already made up their minds) it will probably be another year and a half before we need to "go live".  I have several modules I have developed for it and have 3 in process right now so to move to another platform is going to have a huge effort behind it.  Yeah, I can simply "copy" a lot of my code across (standard logic), but any integration with the core will have to be rewritten.  Ugh!  On the other hand, we're finally hiring another developer on so I'm not going to be the lone-ranger anymore so in lieu of my other 15 ongoing projects we might be able to shift things around and actually make it happen. :)

The key points that they really want out of Sharepoint are the following:

  • Full-text search and indexing (including all content and documents such as word, excel, pdf, etc)
  • Workflow, collaboration, versioning
  • Forms (Infopath) -- right now we are using Enterprise Forms for a lot of things and it is pretty dang good, we also have a lot of legacy forms in PDF that we finagle our way around and manage to use in our day to day processes
  • Others (don't have my list with me, I'm at home, but there was a pretty big list) -- a lot of the "others" are accomplishable through third party modules in some fashion, but a lot of it comes down to the tight Office integration

If anybody has any questions about our setup, process, etc, I'm more than happy to talk about it.  We will most likely go Sharepoint for our intranet but we'll still have a site or two running DNN (I am in the process of creating an external website for our Commercial Real Estate department and it'll be using DNN).  I have another website that our SBA department wants as well, most likely going to use DNN for it.  And of course, my own business where I currently have two modules available commercially and one free one, then a couple in the works (hopefully get them done one of these days), so I definitely plan on sticking with DNN for a while.  Just when management says jump, I need to say "how high?".


-- Jon Seeley
DotNetNuke Modules
Custom DotNetNuke and .NET Development
http://www.seeleyware.com
 
New Post
2/22/2008 10:18 AM
 

Hi Jeff,
I am curious what type of training do you need for your content providors? Do you mean you need a program to go over the basics of DNN administration, security, module mgmt?


www.DotnetnukeTraining.com
 
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