I am one of 4 webmasters at a west coast community college. We are embarking on a dotNetNuke installation to ease our load a bit by letting professors/staff have edit right to their content. It's a great idea, but I find myself increasingly concerned as I get further into dotNetNuke. I have interviewed several if the dnn references who have all said "it's great - the only trouble we have had is during upgrades."

Here are my concerns:

1. The documentation was written by absolute experts in dnn so they tend to overlook/omit items that they unconsciencly assume everybody knows.

2. The program flow (for admin/host) doesn't seem to be intuitive.

3. Every time I go to the dnn site for help, it takes forever to get an answer. The response of the page is about as fast as a snail (my connection speed - verfied by 2wire - is 25-30Mbps). I spend more time waiting for a page to load than I do reading the page. More often than not I get a timeout error. We are a college and absolutely cannot have such a condition. It seems to me that the fastest possible implementation of dnn should be the home dnnn site.

4. Dispite what the gurus say about installation, we have not successfully installed dnn on our server after almost 2 week of trying. (I gave up on my personal/training installation after 6 attempts of carefully following the instructions.)

I have other concerns, but you get my point: I think the light at the end of the tunnel is the train!

The reason for this post: Has anyone out there experienced similar frustration? Did you get through them? How did you get through them? In short, is there daylight at the end of the tunnel or should be take a different path?

Thanks for any responses,

Gordon

I understand your point about documentation, but it's a difficult area to get right for everyone, as our userbase covers everyone from complete newbies to the most cutting edge. Recently we doubled the installation document from 30 pages to 65+ pages, but realistically to cover every supported OS  , IIS version and SQL version would result in a huge document that would be too large to download, and a large overhead for the coreteam to keep up to date. The majority of the complexity is in getting these factors of the environment right (which is a similar requirement for pretty much any asp.net web app)- the actually dnn specific configuration is really only a few settings in the web.config file. That said, we are planning to use the dnn wiki when it's a bit more production ready - at that point i expect we and the community will be better able to cover areas such as this in much greater depth (as well as support multiple languages)

In the meantime, I'd recommend you take a look at the installer project http://dotnetnuke.com/DotNetNukeProjects/UtilityInstaller/tabid/838/forumid/62/threadid/63862/scope/posts/Default.aspx , it's only in beta at the minute, but it's covers many of the common setup scenarios well already.

We are suffering some performance problems at the minute, we're working to address these (I detailed some of them in this thread http://dotnetnuke.com/Community/ForumsDotNetNuke/tabid/795/mid/2108/forumid/118/threadid/64609/scope/posts/Default.aspx ). Also details of a recent outage are here http://dotnetnuke.com/Community/ForumsDotNetNuke/tabid/795/forumid/65/threadid/64978/scope/posts/Default.aspx , as well as a note on our plans to improve our server setup. This should help substantially (note: we've wanted to do this for some time, but as a volunteer opensource project it takes time to get resources such as servers/bandwidth etc.)

Cathal