(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The steward of the web application framework open source project, DotNetNuke (www.dotnetnuke.com) has launched DotNetNuke Professional Edition 5.1, the latest release of its web content management and application development framework for business-critical websites and web applications built on Microsoft .NET (www.microsoft.com/NET).
Built on the same open-source core as the free Community Edition, DotNetNuke Professional Edition offers exclusive features, as well as fully supported, documented and secure software package, helping companies reduce the cost of website and web application development and maintenance, offering a highly extensible toolkit that maximizes their existing Microsoft investments.
“DotNetNuke already powers hundreds of thousands of production websites, but we recognized that organizations running business-critical websites needed additional services and product features which were not available in the free Community Edition,” DotNetNuke president and chief executive officer Navin Nagiah said in a statement. “The new release of the DotNetNuke Professional Edition gives our customers the unique product features, support, and flexibility they need for success.”
DotNetNuke Professional Edition 5.1 offers support for advanced Google Analytics functionality, content approval that allows administrators to create custom workflows, file access permissions that provide more granular security rights, and file integrity checking that reviews files in the installation and reports any inconsistencies that may impact website reliability, as well as network-based health monitoring that pings the website periodically to identify failures and notify the site owner, ensuring the site stays in web server memory for faster user accessibility. It also includes a vulnerability database that cross references each customer’s product version teasily identify potential issues.
DotNetNuke Professional Edition is also designed for organizations with high website traffic, offering distributed caching for more efficient resource usage in web farms. DotNetNuke founder Shaun Walker explains that the professional edition helps ensure a web application can handle high traffic scenarios by integrating a caching solution into the application architecture to keep the most commonly used data in memory.
“The Microsoft ASP.NET framework (which DotNetNuke is built upon) provides a basic caching solution but it is limited to a single web server because it has no built-in capability to synchronize cache items across multiple web servers,” Walker said in a statement. “DotNetNuke has built an extra layer on top of the ASP.NET caching solution which allows for web farm synchronization using 3 different approaches: database polling, file system dependency, and web service. The web service solution was developed specifically for DotNetNuke Professional Edition 5.1, and is the optimal solution for serious business environments.”
Priced at $1,999 per instance annually, DotNetNuke Professional Edition includes a fully tested and verified software package, full product documentation, access to an online knowledge base, security update email alerts, unlimited technical support, and product copyright indemnification.
With more than 700,000 members, DotNetNuke is the largest open-source Microsoft community and the software has been downloaded more than six million times.
DotNetNuke Professional Edition offers all the advantages of the DotNetNuke platform that have drawn thousands of developers. Nagiah said the biggest reason developers choose DotNetNuke its ease of use. “It’s easy to use and its users like it a lot. The second [reason] is that it’s flexible and extensible. It’s a framework that helps you deploy a website out of the box, and at the same time, it is flexible in that if there is an aspect that you don’t like, (for instance if you don’t like the forms module, or the workflow module, or something else) you can take that out, build your own module and plug it in, or you can buy a module from a third-party vendor.”
Users can easily extend the DotNetNuke solution by purchasing add-on extensions from the DotNetNuke Marketplace, which features thousands of third-party software modules and skins from hundreds of independent vendors.
Founded in 2006, San Mateo, California-based DotNetNuke has since secured financing from venture capital firms August Capital (www.augustcap.com) and Sierra Ventures (www.sierraventures.com), and opened operations in Vancouver.
