iFinity

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Tuesday, November 22, 2011 1:42 PM 

Well, it’s a week since I returned from the whirlwind that was DotNetNuke World.  Already things are starting to slip back into normality from the head-spinning fury of activity that was the conference.

All I can say is that if you didn’t go, start pencilling in the date and the budget to go next year.

This was the first year that DotNetNuke had it’s own, stand-alone conference, one that wasn’t co-located with the bigger DevConnections conference.  It was also a change in location, from Las Vegas to Orlando.  These two changes made a very big difference to the feel of the conference.

Because it was only DotNetNuke people, it immediately felt more inclusive, more friendly and more focussed.  Because it was no longer in the cavernous halls of the DevConnections conference with what seems like a mile of walking to and from the hotel, it immediately felt more accessible.  And because there was *blink blink* outside areas to break out into, it gave everyone a chance to enjoy some warm Florida sunshine (not that I have any shortage of that where I come from, but those Northern types seemed to enjoy it).

Here was an event where everyone you saw with a white lanyard on was a great person to have a chat to.

Conference Highlights

The Keynote speeches from Shaun Walker and Navin Nagiah were top quality.  Shaun covered off the achievements of DotNetNuke in the past 12 months, and the roadmap of features going forwards.  This included showcasing the impressive new Mobile features released in DNN 6.1, and answering some of those burning questions, like when were the social features going to be included. Shaun also recapped some of the impressive awards gained by DNN in 2011, including making the Gartner Magic Quadrant and placing in the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing companies.  It’s easy to forget how fast all this has happened, because just 3 years ago DotNetNuke was a tiny company formed around the ownership of the DotNetNuke open source project.  Now it’s growing fast and the conference is evidence for all to see.  One statistics : all time DotNetNuke downloads are now at 7 million, and there are 700,000 live websites running DotNetNuke in the world.

Of course, the big laugh of the day was reserved for the revealing of the Shaun Walker Bobblehead doll.  Mitch Bishop, the new Chief Marketing Officer at DotNetNuke, revealed that they had made a limited-edition run of 50 ‘bobblehead’ dolls of Shaun.  Mitch presented one of these to a clearly flummoxed Shaun, and then told the crowd that any great questions, presentations, antics throughout the conference would result in the presentation of a bobblehead.   From then, it was up to people to come up with interesting ways of what to do with their bobbleheads – in the bounds of good taste, of course!  This even included stripping down and jumping in the pool to retrieve a bobble head, which Malik of Pointclick Technologies did, much to everyone's amusement.

Navin’s keynote was a more sober affair, and clearly laid out the philosophy and strategy behind DotNetNuke and exhorted us in the crowd to do better, to work harder, because the competition out there in the Website platform business is fierce.   There is still a massive market for people to be running a complete website solution like DotNetNuke but it’s likely to be a winner takes all result, and with 1200 different options available, DotNetNuke needs to concentrate on being in the top 3.

The ‘DNN After Dark’ function was a huge improvement over previous events I had attended and everyone there clearly had a good time.  If you were there, you’ll know about the infamous Nerf dart war that broke out using promotional toys from Arrow Consulting.  If that sounds like a bunch of computer nerds gone wild, well, it would be hard to disabuse that notion.  But more realistically it just shows that everyone was having a great time and it was a very fun event.  The fact that the room was full shows how keen attendees are to engage in both the learning and the social segments of the conference.

Presentations

Sadly with three of my own presentations to deliver, and lots of interesting conversations to be had in the hallways and breakout areas, I didn’t get to attend many sessions, and only grabbed parts of different presentations throughout the two full days of presenting.  But a lot of people told me there was some great sessions delivered.  Every session I peeked into was well attended and well regarded.

For my sessions, I did three topics.  As a few people remarked – I must have done something to annoy the organisers to get that many sessions.  But in reality I had a lot of fun presenting and it was great to cover three entirely different topics:

DotNetNuke on Azure Cloud Servers

This presentation was both a discussion on how to create a DotNetNuke installation using the DotNetNuke Azure Accelerator, and also a discussion on how to strategically use Azure with DNN, both as a hosting service, but also for hosting content or using the CDN.

If you missed this presentation, you can read more about it here, and don’t miss the link provided by Microsoft to get a free 90 day trial for Azure.  Everyone should grab a copy of the Azure Accelerator, sign up for a free Azure trial, and see how easy it is to create a DNN website on Azure.

See separate blog post on this session including the slides.

Your humble blogger presenting the session on DotNetNuke and Azure.  Photo courtesy David Rodriguez.

Tracking Social Media Campaigns for Effectiveness

In this session, I covered off many of the tools available for tracking your Social media activity.  I then presented the concept of gathering all these different metrics into a central location, and creating your own trend lines.  The idea with this is to gather the metrics on a periodic basis, then map your own trends based on the things that are most important to your campaign.  Part of this is identifying the goals of the campaign (followers, downloads, sales?)   Once this is in place, you can monitor which parts of your social media campaign are the most effective (in meeting your goals) and use simple analysis to double-down on the things that work, and abandon or at least cut back on the things that aren’t.

See separate blog post on this session including the slides.

Selling code in the DotNetNuke Store : from idea to execution

I had submitted this concept to the organisers of DotNetNuke conferences for 3 years in a row, so I was delighted when it was selected as a topic.  My only regret was the short 50 minute timeline with which to try and cram in all the things I have to say on this topic.  What the audience received was a high-speed download of my thoughts on the world of software development, how to become a successful vendor, and a presentation on how the upcoming changes to Snowcovered (soon to be re-branded the DotNetNuke store) are about to make the DotNetNuke eco-system a great place to be if you have the ability to write good code and indulge in a bit of shameless marketing.  This session was a lot of fun and it’s just a shame I didn’t get the chance to connect with more people who have questions on becoming part of this exciting little corner of the software industry.  Perhaps I might start a new blog series or something similar on this very topic because I sense there is great interest in it.

See separate blog post on this session including the slides

Putting the last touches on one of my presentations while Scott Willhite  questions my choice of hardware in the DotNetNuke Community breakout area.

Photo courtesy Will Strohl

Networking

All I can say about the networking at the DotNetNuke World conference is that it can’t be beaten.   This is the third year in a row that I have attended a DotNetNuke conference and I still run into people I haven’t met, some of whom are new to using DotNetNuke, some of whom are old hands.  And each year I enjoy renewing the friendships with people I have already met.    If all the conferences you’ve ever been to are full of people politely sipping coffee and making small talk until they can escape back to their rooms, you’ve got to attend a future DotNetNuke conference to witness the high energy exchanges of ideas and information, the meetings and more.  From the early morning breakfast discussions to the late-night free and frank exchanges of ideas in the hotel bar, the fun just never stops.

However, apart from the fun aspect of meeting people and finding out what they are working on, the networking at DNN World made me realise that the DotNetNuke platform is rapidly growing up.  Where once my main conversations where with smaller system integrators, hosting firms and the like, increasingly my conversations where with government departments, representatives from larger companies, and people working on big projects.  This is an important change, because it shows that developers like myself need to step up again to a higher level of quality and support, and to recognise that the combination of people ‘out there’ is changing quickly in the mix.

Deep in conversation at the lunch table during DotNetNuke World.  Photo courtesy Will Strohl

Conclusions and Wrap up

It’s incredibly important for people like myself who are geographically isolated from many others who work on the same things to attend conferences like DotNetNuke World.  It’s why I spend the time and the money to attend, even though doing so means spending well over 24 hours in transit to get from my home to the conference.  The rewards certainly outweigh the costs, even though when it comes to booking it’s easy to feel that this won’t be the case. 

With DotNetNuke World 2011 in Orlando, the concept of the DotNetNuke conference really came of age.  It developed a confidence in itself as a conference, and a confidence of DotNetNuke as a platform not only for writing software and building websites, but also for building businesses and relationships that will probably endure for a long time.  In the same way the conference no longer felt like a bolt-on to a .NET conference, the platform no longer feels like a bolt-on to the .NET framework but an entity unto itself that even Microsoft is taking notice of and supporting.

Mitch Bishop asked us all to tell 5 people about the conference so that it can double in size next year.   I’m using my blog to do my part  - I hope I’ve got those who attended smiling in memory, and those who didn’t pencilling attendance for 2012 into their personal plan for next year. The dates will be announced much earlier this time, so there will be no reason not to go.   Will I see you there?

My Shaun Walker Bobblehead learns a thing or two between sessions

Want to see more?  Visit the Flickr DotNetNuke World photoset.   Please remember to abide by the licensing attached to individual photos.

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