As a corporate developer I have pushed DNN into an intranet framework for a government client.  The tools has been relatively well received, and most customers support its as a concept.  However, I constantly get comments like "DNN is only for community use" or "it wouldn't work for an organisation of this size (2000 users)".

I would like some feedback from anyone who has used DNN in an environment with large numbers of Users.  What is your experience - good and bad?  I'd especially like to know about the success of using Windows authentication and AD.

I will very much appreciate any feedback from large corporate users.

Steve T 

I also work for a government agency with about 2000 employees, and am evaluating DNN for use as the intranet. We are using it as our Internet site, and it works great. However, I am seriously questioning whether I would be willing to recommend using DNN as our intranet site.

My first and main reason for not wanting to use DNN as our intranet site is the lack of support in general for it. DNN's own site is constantly getting errors since they upgraded to the latest version, yet I don't see much support for users who report similar issues with their own sites. I have no idea if the core team is working on fixes and if so, when they expect to have them. I do completely understand that it is volunteers working on DNN, however, I am not a volunteer for my agency, and if DNN goes down, it is my job to get it fixed. I would feel much more comfortable supporting an application that has a professional support staff to assist when there are problems.

My second reason is that while I have gotten the AD integration working with no problems, the AD integration doesn't seem to support removing people from roles in DNN if they have been removed from the corresponding role in AD, which seems like a major hole to me. And it appears that no one is working on the AD module, so I don't see any indication that the issue will be solved any time soon. And it annoys me to no end to see lots of work being put into a core forum module, when I can go out and buy a great DNN forum module for a piddly $50. Aren't there better places that effort could be put? Again, I know this is a volunteer effort, and it is probably more fun for someone to work on a new forum module than it is to put more work into more fundamental aspects like AD, but that just reinforces to me that this is not a product meant for corporate use. If DNN hadn't designated AD integration as a core module, then maybe there would be entrepreneurs working on good modules for it, but by designating it as core, who is going to waste their time developing one now?

There is a LOT of very good things to say about DNN, which is why I've been trying so hard to see if I could make it work for our organization. The bottom line, though, is that I just don't see the kind of support and direction that I need if I am going to be staking my job on it.

Funny you should mention the effort (great!) put into the forum. I was just about to download the source so I can chuck out all the bells and whistles so it's acceptable for everyday use in a corporate environment.

A lot of bling bling in the forum module!

Though it's great of course.

chris