DotNetNuke and MOSS - When and Where

Many of you know that my claim to fame is being one of the developers of DotNetNuke and writing two Wrox books on DNN. The question is, where does DNN come into play in our Microsoft practice? Another question is where is the relation to MOSS? 

Both MOSS and DNN provide you with a framework to do custom development on. The provide content management, security, and utilities to make your life as a developer a bit easier. 

MOSS is aimed at the enterprise, there can be no doubt when talking to a client about what they need to run their intranet that MOSS is the answer. MOSS has the Office integration, enterprise search, collaboration tools, and much more for helping the company with their day to day business operations. If you're targeting development at the enterprise then MOSS should be the platform that you develop against. 

DNN is aimed at the shared hosting space first and foremost. To provide you with some history, when we initially developed DNN, Microsoft sponsored the project heavily. They put us in touch with the Patterns and Practices group to develop our membership provider as well as our data provider layer. In fact our relationship with Microsoft was one of the reasons they released the ASP.NET 2.0 membership provider ahead of the rest of the stack, and licensed it for production use. Since DNN was using the provider as well as Community Server we influenced the group to ensure our application could be used in a production environment. 

That being said, the primary reason for support by Microsoft and the aim at the shared hosting space is LAMP = Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. With DNN you had an open source solution that ran on the Microsoft OS. At that time we even supported Access MDB databases, so you could use that as your backend. The only cost then was the Backoffice license. This helped Microsoft have an alternative offering against LAMP, quickly major hosting providers jumped in to support this offering, like GoDaddy for example. 

Another aim for DNN is the smaller mom and pop shops who may be turned off by some of the licensing schemes of the commercial products. DNN has a BSD license which is the most liberal license available, the only restriction is the copyright needs to be in the source code (which gets compiled and no one ever sees anyway). This way you can provide a full suite of portal functionality without any cost to the client. You can then do your custom app dev against the module architecture of DNN. Modular development is the way to go, and DNN does a great job in this space. 

Right now we're working on a proposal for a small company website, the product fit is DNN. It will provide the client with a bunch of great CMS tools for their website as well as a lot of functionality out of the box. We'll the code an exam engine for their site. Costs go down, easier to support, and the hand off to the client is much smoother. In addition, they're confident that they can maintain the application themselves (since there are many books available on DNN) or find a provider. 

So remember MOSS for the enterprise, and DNN for the shared hosting, and small custom app dev space. It provides us with a solution to cover the entire custom app dev space and differentiates Sogeti among other providers.