DotNetNuke Brings Open Source Social To WindowsDotNetNuke Brings Open Source Social To Windows

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DotNetNuke, the open-source content management system for Windows, also now is the open-source enterprise social platform for Windows.

"What our customers are telling us is they can't afford point solutions for social enterprise," said Mitch Bishop, chief marketing officer at DotNetNuke Corp., the company that backs the software. "They want to extend their DotNetNuke sites with social capabilities and just have it all integrated."

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With DotNetNuke 6.2, the platform is getting many of the same features associated with social software platforms from companies such as Jive and IBM, such as activity streams, profiles and directories, social groups and forums, and the ability to follow other users. These features will be available in both the community edition, which is a free download, and the company-backed editions which start at $2,998 per year, including a support contract and additional features such as high-performance caching.

This also sets DotNetNuke up as a potential rival to NewsGator Social Sites, which Forrester considers one of the four leading broad enterprise social platforms because of its ability to round out SharePoint as a social platform.

DotNetNuke is not as SharePoint-centric as NewsGator, which delivers its enterprise social experience as an application that runs on top of SharePoint, but integration with SharePoint 2010 was one of the other features added in the DotNetNuke release announced this week.

"SharePoint is best of breed for managing documents internally, but it isn't the best for public-facing websites or solutions around that," Bishop said.

DotNetNuke can be used to manage either internal or external websites. Most of the interest in social features is coming from DotNetNuke customers who want to use the platform to power social intranets, Bishop said. However, the only reference customer announced so far is CharityVillage, a community site for Canadian non-profits, which redesigned its website around the new features. Features that lend themselves to public website use include social login via Facebook, Twitter, and Google to drive community participation.

On the social intranet front, "we've seen a lot of good activity around the beta, which has been out for a month, but nothing in production yet," Bishop said.

That didn't stop whoever wrote the latest copy for the DotNetNuke website from proclaiming the web content management system "The #1 Social WCMS for Business."

DotNetNuke originated in 2002 as a Microsoft platform alternative to open-source Web content management systems and frameworks, which also used "nuke" in their name, such as PHP Nuke. It began being sold commercially three years ago, Bishop said.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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