What I find interesting is that we have to completely different perspectives here.

There is DNN Corp who says that a lot of improvements, especially for the community, evolved with the recent brand changes and that the visibility of the free platform has never been better.

Then there is the community where a lot of members cannot seem to experience those improvements and feel lost.

While DNN Corp might have implemented a bunch of improvements, be it on the website itself or be it internal structures that might lead to improvements in the long run, DNN Corp should respect that they must have done something wrong if many people do either not appreciate or cannot observe those positive changes.

There are a few aspects that one can simple not rationalize away.

• A newbie coming to the DNN website does not get any kind of indicator that there is free version of DNN available and that this free version actually is a piece of software that you can download, install and run, out of the box. All the links on the homepage are leading to resources that tell visitors about a commercial product
• While it might hold true that DNN platform is nothing more than a platform, a platform is for most people not a working product. A platform is something you have to extend on in order to get a fully operational software that you can do things with. That is why the name change to DNN platform was a bad move, at least from a marketing point of view. DNN platform de-facto IS a fully operational website after installing it and the way the new website is setup this fact is sort of ignored and hidden to the public
• When it comes to community a visitor’s first impression will be that there is not much in there. You have to dig down quite a bit in the site structure and find those little links at the top to actually enter those areas of the site that most people will be interested in: Community Exchange, Community Voice and discussions.
• If you compare the community and company blog sections on the website, you will get the visual indicator of what seems to be more important content. The community blogs look like someone has move the old blogs to a new software just so that it is there without any love. No structure whatsoever, no tagging, no authors view. Now go to the company blog and notice that it’s all there.

On a side note, what is also very interesting, is that the new website of DNN does look fantastic. From a design point of view I love it very much. But, it is noteworthy that building and maintain a site like that with DNN is a very hard job. No way can a regular site editor manage the content with that kind of design by using a common rich text editor. There is a lot of html fiddling taken place here and DNN still has a long way to go when it comes to easy usage of the platform. DNN is easy to install, easy to extend and it is also very powerful and feature rich. It is certainly not easy to use though.

My personal conclusion though is “Don’t worry”. DNN Corp is a company, they want and need to make money so they can pay their bills and staff and make investors happy. What we make out of that is up to us. Changes are sometimes difficult and not everybody likes them, but most of the time a change will also provide opportunities to improve something yourself. A development company leaving the market most likely has done a bad job in operating its business, one cannot blame DNN Corp for that. A business being bought by another company is something that happens every day out in the economical world. That’s just how it works. What surprises me much more is that the gaps left behind by these deals have not been filled by other businesses. Building extensions like ActiveForums, URLMaster or another DMS is no rocket science; most developers would be able to do that. As I said, changes are also an opportunity, but no one seems to be picking up those opportunities.

Look at EVOQ content for example. A vertical solution for a hell lot of money. But what does it offer, technically? A few extensions compared to DNN platform that a single developer can build in a few days and I’m pretty sure it could even much more powerful that what EVOQ content offers.

I have not seen a single vertical solution like EVOQ Content on the market. I know that people package their own DNN solution and give it to their clients. But the ecosystem has the absolute right (and power!) to create its own solutions and sell them. Why do we care so much what DNN Corp is doing? If you have a business around DNN then you should care much more about your business than about DNN Corp’s business.