As many of you know, I’ve been recommending DotNetNuke as a CMS to organizations for years.  It is the largest open source project built on Microsoft’s .NET framework and just recently DotNetNuke Corporation, the company which manages the project, received their first round of funding from August Capital and Sierra Ventures.  Yes, this is tremendously exciting for everyone associated with DotNetNuke.  It heralds amazing opportunities as the news filters through enterprises of various sizes who have heard of DotNetNuke but were not ready to commit for various reasons.  It tells IT Directors and CIOs and other decision makers that DotNetNuke is maturing and moving from a technical focus, to a business focus.

This isn’t to say that the original 4 founders of DotNetNuke (Shaun Walker, Joe Brinkman, Scott Willhite and Nik Kalyani) somehow didn’t have their ear to the ground on the business side.  As Nik Kalyani has described in a recent post on his blog, they are all first and foremost technicians with very little time to formulate a solid business strategy.  In spite of their limitations of time and resources, they did an incredible job at leading the DotNetNuke project to become the most successful open source project available on Microsoft’s .NET platform.  As far as I was concerned, DotNetNuke didn’t need Series A capital and the backing of business advisors like Larry Augustin and Navin Nagiah (who was recently named DotNetNuke’s new CEO) to merit recommendation to organizations of any size.  I’ve been recommending it to my clients for 4 years now and without exception, these clients who are mainly national associations have been tremendously pleased with the product.

So, I was really pleased to read Navin’s recent post in the DotNetNuke blog where he asked the community for feedback regarding the goal of DotNetNuke.  In this post, Navin formulated a goal for the DotNetNuke, saying, “We have to become a mission critical piece of an organization’s software infrastructure – the framework that helps organizations design, build and deploy their entire web strategy; i.e. both applications and content.”

Of course, that’s the goal.  And I’m guessing here, because I’m also a technician who likes to read and think from the business side as much as possible, but I would have to guess that Navin and the rest of the DotNetNuke leadership team will or already have formulated a set of core values and then from these values a key set of strategies to achieve this goal. 

It’s this core set of values that I’m interested in talking about with this first post.  If I have the time, I may also write a post with my thoughts about strategy. 

In a fascinating book that I read recently called Good to Great, Jim Collins explains that the really great organizations he studied had all identified what he called their hedgehog principle.  If you haven't read Good to Great, the hedgehog principle is the intersection of what you're passionate about, what makes you money and what you're really good at.

An example that Jim gives in his book is Walgreens and their unrelenting focus on convenience.  Unlike competitors who have been know to acquire existing drug stores based on a desire to have a certain number of stores within a region, Walgreens will carefully consider each location and pass over opportunities to buy an existing store if the location isn’t convenient.  And of course, product selection, store layout and design are all based on convenience as well. 

If I had to take a stab at a hedgehog principle for DNN, it would be something like this:

DotNetNuke is the most extensible, enterprise-scale open source CMS available. 

And if I had to boil it down to one word, if, for example, a CIO asked me in an elevator what’s the most compelling reason to adopt DotNetNuke in their enterprise, I would say, “It’s the most extensible portal framework on the planet.”

I think a number of great adjectives could be added to the mix, like well architected and broadly supported; but these are related to extensibility and in my experience organizations have gone with DotNetNuke for their web properties because of the potential for DotNetNuke to work within such a wide variety of needs.

Need to integrate with an existing CRM?  No problem.  There's a provider infrastructure that makes this possible.  Need to create a web site that will support future LMS courses?  No problem.  Just start with DotNetNuke and use an existing LMS module from the DNN community or hire one of thousands of companies around the globe proficient in DNN development to design and build a custom LMS solution that integrates with your existing management systems?  Need to create a site with sub-sites for affiliates or subsidiaries that can be easily provisioned using an automated process?  No problem, that's built into DNN.  Need to create a site that will allow staff developers to utilize their existing .NET development skills to develop custom modules and extensions?  Again, no problem.  DotNetNuke is built on top of Microsoft’s .NET platform and there are literally thousands of resources available around the world that can help your organization achieve it's goals.  And the list goes on and on.

What do you think?  Is extensibility the main reason DNN gets adopted?  What would be your elevator pitch for DNN?  Or maybe this post has raised your interest in DotNetNuke.  If so, feel free to give us a call.