I just wanted to take a minute to remind/warn people regarding the purchasing of add on modules for DNN. We purchased the Content Sharing module from Ethuongmai only to be stung by some fine print in the licensing. Admittedly we missed the technicality, but still it is worth mentioning:

When you purchase their product you are allowed to use it on one portal, and unlimited child portals (and one development portal with unlimited child portals). This all sounds great, however there are 2 gotchas:

1. You need to activate the module on the portal before it will opperate properly, to do this, you must submit the URL from the parent portal (host header). The company will then e-mail you a key text file to unlock the module. You cannot license the module for multiple host header name apparently, so if your site goes by www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.ca then you are out of luck. Another pain with this foolish module registration method is that if you want to change your host header for your parent portal, then you have to re-request a key for the module. So in our case, we were developing a site for a company with an existing website, so we set up the DNN site using a temporary host header:  preview.mydomain.com which would be changed once the new dnn site had been approved to replace the existing site.

2. There is a provision to run the module in unlimited child sites on one single portal, however, the child sites must not have unique domain host headers applied, even though it is a child portal under the parent (root) portal. Although this is easy and convenient to do in DNN, this is not apparenly within their license. We missed the critical detail:

A) If you purchased a PA/Binary LICENSE: You are granted a license to install the SOFTWARE PRODUCT on a single production web server, and use it for a SINGLE DotNetNuke PARENT portal/alias (e.g. http://www.domain.com) with UNLIMTED CHILD portals under the licensed parent poral (e.g. http://www.domain.com/childportal). You are also permitted to use the same license for another non-production development or staging servers.

(note that the use of the word e.g. does not represent a requirement of case, only that it is an example of a case)

SO: if you happen to use a host header for your child portal, then you have to purchase another license, or a server license!

I hope that I am not misunderstood here: I do not want to bypass or improperly use a product, however, to me, to license a product by host header or domain is agravating, I understand that the goal is to prevent completely extending a single license across numerous portals all opperated by different individuals, but in my case, this is for a single organization who just want to use host headers to identify child portals more easily than domain/childportal...

This type of licensing in my view is counter-productive, insulting and even sneaky, If a product can legally function within the license agreement logically within a system (DNN portal with child portals) then it should not tie into my choice of naming child portals with host headers, or furthermore into my choice of parent domain.

Imagine that if I use this product in an environment where I register a domain with the company called tech.mydomain.com, then later change it to support.mydomain.com, I actually have to contact the company directly and wait for them to reissue a license. Same for child portals...

I disagree with this type of license, and warn others to read the license terms more carefully than I did so that you can avoid companies acting in bad faith in order to limit the use of their software under the guise of license compliance.

Disapointed...

Keith Waldron