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A Good #DNNWorld Was Had By All!
The day started with a keynote by Cliff Reaves, Gen. Mgr of Microsoft's emerging business team. Very well recieved, Cliff shared MS's (pretty obvious) future direction in mobile. He showed a forecast for 400M+ smartphones sold in 2012 vs only 200M PC's. Mobile computing unit sales surpassed desktop last year.
There was a second keynote by Navin Nagiah, CEO of DotNetNuke Corp before lunch. I missed the beginning since I needed to handle a client call, but when I entered the room he was showing a video where DNN Corp is going to be selling hosting, the CMS itself, and fully built websites. I'm still a bit confused by this; I thought that's what the partners and the Community did! I'm very interested in other ecosystem members' views on this. Feel free to comment here or contact me 'offline.'
Bruce Chapman from iFinity gave a great talk on tracking social media traffic to the website and showed a number of free tools to help monitor your efforts. Among the many good points he made: the least important measurement is Activity; the most important is Conversion.
Cassidie Brinkman from 10 Pound Gorilla gave a good talk on distributing your website content to the social media channels through automation. Her company used announcement modules with RSS outputs plus a free distribution service ( she mentioned dlvr.it but there are others ) that will post to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The second part of the class was in making customized forms for the client that provide a simpler front-end to the modules.
DNN Corp invited three admins from government. These people bought either Professional or Enterprise Editions and then built fairly large sites. They all did a fine job explaining their sites.
DNN Corp also ran the seminar on Sharepoint Connection. They explained the concept of Sharepoint integration, ie, exposing some of the shared documents on the SharePoint server via the public website via a software component on the Sharepoint server and a module on the DNN server. That was very easy to grasp. The server response made the live demo very slow-moving.
Scott Willhite led a very nice discussion on the DNN Community, and told us of some plans. The biggest one: a new exchange akin to overstock that improves on the forum concept. They'll be releasing it soon, and What's more, they're putting it in the forge as a module so we can use it with customers. I already have somebody in mind for it!
Finally, a wrap-up and Q&A session with Shaun, Navin and Scott. Lots of general questions. It felt like the audience was overall quite pleased with the conference in general. I asked what future plans they had, and they said they'll be doing another conference next year. We look forward to coming back, and we'll have to figure out how Day of DNN Chicago fits into all this. Any thoughts?
My 6:55am flight will be here sooner than I'd like, so that's all the DNN for one day!
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Don Gingold
Co-Founder and Managing Director of Sprocket Websites, Inc.; Co-Founder Chicago Area DotNetNuke User Group
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