For as long as they have been out, I have been annoyed by those people walking around with those hands free devices for cell phones. Not as much for the way they seem to intice people to more frequently bring their phones into socially unacceptable situations (quiet restaurant, movie theatre, bathrooms, etc), or for how they make completely normal folks appear insane conversing with bushes, tables, the floor, etc, but for how many times they make you feel like a  TOTAL fool when you engage in a conversation with the guy next to you who suddenly starts talking to you (and actually is on a conversation with someone else).

I have managed to avoid them for the longest time but yesterday, I finally had to accept assimilation. Turns out, resistance was futile. I recently got back into the consulting world. I do a ton of driving and more than often am called to participate in conf calls while driving. Since I want to try and NO make my wife a widow with 3 young children, I decided hands-free was the way to go. So I look the ones avalable for my phone (I got a razor). I settle on a sweet little thing from motorola with the little flip arm. It's got the fancy blue light that ensures I now look like a Borg when I get it hooked into my ear.

So after the 2 hours it takes to charge the first time (probably the shortest time to charge ANY rechargable device I have ever bought), I try it out. I try to call someone who I know will be sure to give it a complete test. So of course, I call my mother. I hook it in, touch the button on the earpice and get a womans voice "Say a command." (I resist the urge to insert a completely cheauvanist comment in here relating to my wife, out of concern for my own health). I tell it "Call Mom". Which it does. So we get talking, she is in Buffalo, which got socked with a nice Oct snowstorm last week so she has a lot to talk about. So we are chatting away.

My 4 year old, walks up next to me. Looks at the floor infront of me, at the chair, puzzles a bit. "umm Daddy?"  "Yes dear, what you need?", "Um, who you talking too?....."

          I have seen a lot of buzz lately about DotNetNuke. I even attended a developer guild meeting at the Microsoft campus in Charlotte, NC that covered it. The scary part is I have seen a HUGE amount of disinformation about it when it comes to a side-by-side comparison between the two. I have even had clients/employers suggest replacing SharePoint portals with a DotNetNuke site.  They pulled out a spreadhseet comparing features of the two. Had I not known more about SharePoint than the author did, I may have been convinced that DNN was the way to go as well. 

          To start off with, let give a little background on myself in relation to this topic. I have been playing with .Net since 1.0 was Beta 1. I myself played a part in authoring SharePoint like frameworks before we really had SharePoint. So when I finally got into SharePoint, I immediately saw the value in the product. While in general I try to be as unbiased as possible, to be fair, I am a SharePoint advocate.

          I had the pleasure of working with DNN on a couple occasions. To be sure, it is a great application. It provides a quick and easy way to create a decent looking and functioning portal. It is open source, and it is FREE!!. It is not some hokey pile of garbage. It has been well planned, and developed. If I was going to put up a quick external portal or a fast and easy single team portal in a small shop I would seriously consider DNN as a solution. The fact that a good deal of clients I go to, really utilize a small fraction of their SharePoint installation capabilites, also makes them see it more on equal footing with SharePoint. However, it does have some serious drawbacks. Some of the comparison spreadhseets  I have seen really underline how little folks understand exactly what SharePoint offers. So to start off with let me address some of the more serious ones.

          Office Integration

          There is a reason the new version of SharePoint is called Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. It highlights just how big this feature is. Many DNN comparisons I have seen blow over this like it is some minor little flash feature. It is not. The mostly seemless integration with Microsoft Office is a huge feature. Lets look at the word integration for example. The other day I was authoring a functional spec. I  had the template already on the server which was authored by another guy in our organization. I opened the doc directly in Word, opted to edit (word autmatically checked it out to me on the server so nobody else could edit). I finished, save it, and closed it. It was automatically checked back in, as a new version and any one who was subscribed to that document was emailed that I had updated it. A simple example to be sure, but a good example of the types of stuff being done in the background because of the integration points.

         SharePoint has capability for putting out custom event handlers for handle specific events within the portal. So what? Who uses that? Imagine this scenario. I have a Commerce server site with widgets. A customer orders a widget form the site. The site drops the customers invoice into an infopath doc and drops it into a library in my portal. The event handler fires, creates 3 more documents, one for customer service, one for the manufacturing line, and one for accounting and pushes them out the their respective portal team sites. As the manufacturing process is moving along, the guys on the line update that invoice to reflect the state, the event handlers there update the sales, service, docs accotrdingly. Now the customer calls in and modifies their widget order, the customer service guys KNOW where it isin the manufacturing process because of the updates. They can try to update the doc, which fires an event handler, routes it through a workflow to determine if changes can be made, and makes the necessary updates. We can carry this futher but we can see where it is going. The event handlers are not trivial, when integrated with Biztalk you can get an even more powerful solution and develop and deploy it quickly.

       Scalability 

        I am sure I do not have to spell out why this is important. Which is why I was surpsied to see this as a minor item on some lists. I have seem SharePoint installations scaled out to HUGE organizations, on multiple farms, with clustered SQL DBs. Good luck on trying that with DNN.

       There are more points to be sure and I welcome any additional thoughts. I know I sound down on DNN here and I guess I am. Please, do not take this as a statement that DNN has no value or is garbage. Like I said before though DNN is great application, and hit definitely has its place, but that place is not as a replacement for SharePoint. They fill different need and perhaps could even work well as team, point having DNN sites publicly exposed with integration into an internal portal allowing users to grab data from lists and add/enter info. Allowing the portal itself to stay safely behind the firewall and controlling access. You could quickly set up DNN sites for clients and give those sites access to specific pieces of the portal data. There are many opportunities.