Shaun Walker

DotNetNuke 6.2 Release Candidate ( RC )

shaun.walker@dnncorp.com — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:59:26 GMT

After nearly 7 months, the finish line is finally in sight. With the final touches applied to the product over the past few weeks, we are confident that we are on track for an exciting new product release.

As a bit of a refresher on the release terminology that we use in the DotNetNuke community, I would encourage you to read the blog written by Joe Brinkman last year titled "What's In A Name?". The blog explains that by the time we hit a Release Candidate, the product is pretty much frozen. We have gone through all the major test scenarios and are just running through a final set of regression tests and verifying the packaging. In the absence of any major show-stopping bugs, this is the product which will be released. At this point we only have a week or two until the anticipated release date and are really just taking one last look before we release the product. Any issue found at this stage will likely just be logged in Gemini and be scheduled for correction in a follow on maintenance release.

Customers Prefer “All-In-One” Solutions

shaun.walker@dnncorp.com — Sat, 12 May 2012 03:40:55 GMT

So I have been a smartphone user for a few years now, and it continues to astound me how much I rely on my device on a daily basis. People who know me well will tell you I am generally not an early adopter of technology, so it took me longer than most of my technophile contemporaries before I jumped on the bandwagon. And the real tipping point for me was when I realized that I could replace a number of single-purpose devices with an “all-in-one” solution.

In a practical way I could get rid of my cell phone, my MP3 music player, a GPS, an antiquated voice recorder, and a low resolution point-and-shoot digital camera in favor of a single smart phone. And sure, some of those devices had a few more bells and whistles than what was available on the smartphone, but those were typically features which I did not use or care about. And even better, most smartphones were designed with extensibility in mind… which means that I could easily enhance my smartphone with additional capabilities that matter to me, over and above what comes installed on the device.

In thinking some more about this topic, I realized that the convenience of “all-in-one” solutions have always appealed to me...

DotNetNuke Top 50 CMS

shaun.walker@dnncorp.com — Fri, 11 May 2012 03:04:53 GMT

Last week Website Magazine published their June issue which contained a list of the Top 50 Content Management Solutions available in the market. The list included both open source as well as proprietary content management systems and the ranking was based on a custom formula of website popularity based on average daily unique visitors and page views.

Aside from the list itself, Website Magazine also tried to explain in layman’s terms the definition of a content management system and how they add value to a business. The high level description of a “system that helps digital Web workers manage content in whatever form or type it is available” was fairly good, but the elaboration of “Content management systems act as the skeleton for a Web presence, providing a framework — if you will — for the future growth of a company’s digital assets” was even better, in my opinion. And in terms of evaluating CMS systems, I really liked the statement that “The best content management system is the one that provides features that match the demands and growth projections of your enterprise”.

DotNetNuke made the list at the #13 position, behind a number of very successful enterprise software systems and widely deployed open source projects.

C.M.S. Redefined: Cloud. Mobile. Social.

shaun.walker@dnncorp.com — Wed, 09 May 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Almost exactly one year ago I posted a blog which highlighted the three most pervasive technological trends in the software industry and predicted that the Content Management market was in for a significant disruption in the coming years as it attempts to get comfortable with these new technologies. This same blog was republished with Bryan Ruby’s permission on the CMS Report website.

This morning I kicked off Day 2 at CMS Expo in Chicago, IL with a mini-keynote on this same topic. But rather than just talking about what cloud, mobile, and social represent from a technology perspective, I also tried to explain WHY these trends have come to the forefront in recent years.

At a fundamental level I believe they are actually driven by globalization. And globalization would not have been possible without some critical infrastructure, specifically Internet connectivity, access to broadband, and affordable mobile devices. These innovations provided the basis for a global distributed workforce. However, they alone were not enough to generate the expected return on investment in terms of increased business efficiency and productivity. Rather, this required the emergence of collaborative business networks – networks which could provide the necessary collaboration, coordination, and communication to forge deeper business relationships and more meaningful interactions. And these collaborative business networks rely on those three industry trends which we are all very familiar with now: cloud, mobile, social – also known as systems of engagement. Systems of engagement are critical for getting the most out of a global economy.

In the context of Content Management, we firmly believe that your CMS will continue to be the central hub of your business. However, we also believe that in order to adapt to the changing landscape, your CMS will need to be fully and deeply integrated with systems of engagement. The resulting solution is a perfect marriage of content creation and content delivery. And in looking at the innovation adoption lifecycle, we believe that the cloud, mobile, and social trends have already jumped the chasm and are well on their way to gaining mainstream adoption in the mid-market.

In summary, we believe the future of C.M.S. is already being redefined as Cloud, Mobile, and Social. And we are taking steps to ensure DotNetNuke is ready for this transformation.

The slides for my mini-keynote can be dowloaded here.

DotNetNuke Road Show Coming To Sarasota, Florida

shaun.walker@dnncorp.com — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:07:32 GMT

On Friday, May 4th I am excited to travel to sunny Florida and present to the Sarasota .NET Developers Group ( SarasotaDev ). The presentation will take place at the Sarasota Community Foundation located at 2635 Fruitville Rd in the afternoon from 2:00-4:00 PM. I plan on covering a couple of topics related to DotNetNuke which I think the audience will find highly engaging. The first topic being a presentation and demo of the highly anticipated DotNetNuke 6.2 release which fully integrates the ActiveSocial functionality and transforms the application into a powerful Social CMS. And the second topic being an exploration of technology trends as they relate to Microsoft developers and how DotNetNuke intends to adapt to these trends to ensure it remains a highly relevant web platform for the future. I want to shout out a special thank you to Stan Schultes for arranging the venue and logistics for this event. Following the presentation, the group is invited to attend a great party with awesome pizza, appetizers and drink tickets at the Broadway Bar where we will help kick off the BarCamp Sarasota weekend starting at 5:30pm.

On Saturday, May 5th I am excited to participate in my very first BarCamp conference. The BarCamp Sarasota Spring Conference 2012 is taking place on the weekend of May 5th & 6th at G.WIZ – The Science Museum at 1001 Blvd of the Arts in Sarasota. The 2 day event is full of interesting speakers and sessions, great roundtables and workshops, open-space conversations, and killer parties. I plan to present two topics on Saturday: “C.M.S. Redefined: Cloud. Mobile Social”, a session which highlights the three most disruptive technology trends in recent years and how they will influence the future of Content Management; and “The Business of Open”, a journey through the history of the DotNetNuke project as it evolved from an organic open source project to a venture-backed commercial enterprise.

Microsoft Announces Open Technologies Inc. Subsidiary

shaun.walker@dnncorp.com — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 08:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago Microsoft surprised many folks in the industry by announcing a new wholly owned subsidiary known as Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. The stated goal of the new enterprise is to advance the company’s investment in openness – including interoperability, open standards and open source.

"The subsidiary provides a new way of engaging in a more clearly defined manner. This new structure will help facilitate the interaction between Microsoft's proprietary development processes and the company's open innovation efforts and relationships with open source and open standards communities," said Jean Paoli, who becomes president of the subsidiary after serving as Microsoft's general manager of interoperability strategy.

Since Microsoft chose to trickle out the announcement without much fanfare and without any detailed specifics, there has been a lot of speculation by industry analysts and media in the weeks since. Depending on their level of paranoia for the software giant, people seemed to fall into one of two camps, those who think that Microsoft created the subsidiary because of a desire for greater interoperability and compatibility, and those who feel they were looking for ways to protect their extensive patent portfolio. I actually think that neither of these conclusions were the primary driver. Instead, I personally think it has to do with IP governance.

.NET Popularity Increases, Java and PHP Decrease…

shaun.walker@dnncorp.com — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:00:00 GMT

TIOBE Software has maintained a Programming Community Index for more than 10 years. Updated on a monthly basis, it is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages in use around the world. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers, courses, seminars, and third party vendors actively using the various technologies determined primarily through search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu.

The April 2012 edition was recently released and highlighted some interesting market trends…

Web Experience Management Interoperability (WEMI) and DotNetNuke

shaun.walker@dnncorp.com — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Last week I travelled to Copenhagen, Denmark to participate in the kick-off meeting for the Web Experience Management Interoperability (WEMI) technical committee (TC) which was recently formed by OASIS ( Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards). OASIS is widely respected as a leading web standards consortium which drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society. OASIS is also the home of CMIS, a Content Management Interoperability Services standard that originated in 2009, which in fact served as the catalyst for the new WEMI initiative.

Where CMIS is focused on an open standard that defines an abstraction layer for controlling diverse document management systems and repositories using web protocols, WEMI is more focused on the exchange of unstructured content between web publishing systems. The name “Web Experience Management” was chosen purposely so that the standard is applicable to the broadest audience possible and is not specific to a specific web publishing system architecture, as this initiative is intended to be applicable to Content Management Systems (CMS), Web Content Management (WCM), Web Engagement Management (WEM), Portals, Site Builders, and many others. The founding members of the WEMI TC include many of the world’s leading authorities on web publishing including Magnolia, Acquia (Drupal), Hippo, Sitecore, SDL, Liferay, TYPO3, Jahia, TerminalFour, Adobe, Telerik, Enonic, GX Software, and of course, DotNetNuke.

Mobile Device Detection and Redirection Improvements Coming Soon

shaun.walker@dnncorp.com — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

With mobile device usage expected to eclipse traditional desktop usage by 2015, companies worldwide are looking for ways to adapt and to provide personalized, relevant experiences to site visitors on all types of devices. In response to this market demand, in November 2011 we introduced an exciting new platform capability as part of DotNetNuke 6.1, mobile device detection and redirection management. This announcement was made at our annual user conference, DNN World, and it generated a ton of excitement within our ecosystem.

Device detection provides the ability to determine the type and characteristics of a device being used to browse a website. Once the device is identified, it is possible to make intelligent decisions to provide an optimized experience to the site visitor. This could be as simple as redirecting visitors to an optimized landing page or mobile-optimized site, or it could involve more sophisticated adaptive rendering or responsive design where the website customizes the content being served based on device characteristics.

Device detection is made possible by a Device Description Repository (DDR) which is basically a database of all known devices that provide connectivity to the Internet. In DotNetNuke 6.1 we included a DDR known as WURFL which at the time was available under a compatible open source license. However in the months since, the founders of WURFL decided to change its licensing model, which meant that we were forced to find an alternative. We evaluated a variety of solutions and ultimately concluded that the DDR offering from 51Degrees.mobi provided the highest quality device information while at the same time providing the flexibility to accommodate our business needs.

51Degrees.mobi is based in the United Kingdom and has over 25 years management expertise in developing and managing mobile web services. Their services are used by thousands of websites and currently support over 170 million device visits every month. Through strategic relationships with device manufacturers and other mobile data providers, they are able to maintain an extensive database of device and mobile browser characteristics. 51Degrees.mobi has distributed an open source version of its Lite device data and APIs on Codeplex.com for the past 2 years.

In the upcoming DotNetNuke 6.1.5 release, we will be delivering a fully integrated DDR solution based on 51Degrees.mobi. As part of this integration there are some exciting new features which will be available to both Community Edition and Professional Edition users of the platform.

Obsolescence Policy for DotNetNuke 5.x

shaun.walker@dnncorp.com — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:15:38 GMT

Also known as a “sunset” or “end-of-life” policy, an obsolescence policy describes the terms and conditions for phasing out support for older versions of a software product. This does not mean the software will no longer continue to function; however, it does mean that the product will no longer be actively maintained by the software provider and some forms of technical support may no longer be available.

When we released DotNetNuke 6.0 in July 2011, we made a decision to focus all of our software development and maintenance efforts on the 6.x product line. This meant that we were no longer actively improving the 5.x product line through bug fixes or enhancements. There were many reasons for this decision; with the most obvious one being the fact that the entire platform had undergone a language conversion from VB.NET to C# in version 6.0 which made the task of sustaining the two platforms in parallel highly challenging from a technical perspective.

That being said, we recognized that we absolutely needed to ensure the confidence and safety of our users, so we made a public commitment that we would continue to provide security patches to users of the DotNetNuke 5.x product line for a period of 1 year. This gave the new DotNetNuke 6.x platform time to mature and provided our users and customers the opportunity to make plans to upgrade their web sites and applications in a controlled manner. Over the past 8 months our Security Team has worked very hard to successfully mitigate all vulnerabilities discovered in the platform. And in the cases where those vulnerabilities also affected the 5.x product line, we were diligent in mitigating the public disclosure risk and timing issues by issuing 6.x and 5.x maintenance product releases in parallel. This resulted in four security releases to the 5.x product line ( 5.6.4 – 5.6.7 ) over the past 8 months.

As the one year anniversary of the DotNetNuke 6.0 release draws near I want to again remind our users and customers that we will no longer be providing patches of any sort to the DotNetNuke 5.x product line after July 20, 2012. So in order to ensure that you get the optimal product experience, while at the same time ensure the integrity of your critical website assets, I encourage you to plan your migrations to DotNetNuke 6.x as soon as possible.

I should also mention that our obsolescence policy is focused on our internal development support for various versions of the core DotNetNuke platform. For customers of our Professional or Enterprise Editions, our professional obligations are outlined in the Support Services Addendum to the standard terms and conditions of the DotNetNuke Software License and Service Agreement and are valid as long as a customer has an active subscription license.