DNN SoftwareReviews of dnnsoftware.com

We use Evoq Content Manager to manage a big web site with more than 100 portals, 30.000 active users, and up to 12.000 pages. Evoq is a powerful solution to manage this scenario. We have two web servers with a load balance to get redundance. In comparasion to other PHP CMS Evoq needs few resources on web servers to serve the same ratio of pages. The support given by DNN Software is very helpful and fast.

The DNN platform goes the gamut from allowing the non-technical user to easily post content to allowing the super technical user to create their own modules for more unique needs. My biggest kudos go to the support team at DNN. They are knowledgeable, courteous, and swift in their response and solutions with everything from 'where to find something' to 'how to easily fix something that has gone wrong with the database'.

The EVOQ platform is a fantastic tool for those willing to spend the time to work with it. Its steps ahead of the restrictive templates of WordPress or Joomla. If you are already comfortable with HTML and ASP, then the open ability for customization on a local server install is far better than their competitors. The out of the box platform has modules available for use, but the best experience comes from finding a 3rd party vendor that meets your needs. The only issue of course is that your 3rd party vendor has to keep up with changes made to the core EVOQ installation updates, or you are forced to stay on old versions to keep reasonable functionality. Major areas that lack out of the box even on the professional editions are: E-commerce, Forms, Calendar and Photo Galleries. Now that sounds like basically the whole website, and it's close to it. We have found great third party vendors to spruce up our EVOQ experience such as: DnnGo, Revindex, and N.A. Development. Once you have the modules you need for the functionality that your web users and content creators expect, then the rest is extremely easy to use.

We like the product.

Easy to maintain

To the end user it is easy to use as an efficient content management system providing excellent content publishing tools. To the developer it is a powerful web application framework that can be leveraged for web based software solutions.

I am a Module developer.

Our organization committed wholeheartedly to using DNN as we were in desperate need of a multi-featured CMS that worked in a full Microsoft environment and it seemed to be the best fit for that. In less than three years we have grown our install to 65+ portals, each with unique needs in both functionality and design, and our web growth is expected to continue at this rate for at least the next year. Unfortunately we now find ourselves reconsidering our decision on a product that we are already deeply invested in. Firstly, documentation for all aspects of the product are severely lacking. When I run in to an issue on our system and go to Google to see if anyone else has encountered the issue almost always with DNN the most recent info I can find is for DNN 5 and was posted in 2010. None of this information is of any use to me running DNN 7/8. I know that it has been said that documentation is a priority for them this year but I have yet to see an improvement. Secondly, software upgrades have been no end of headache for us. I have had to do more system-wide rollbacks due to failed upgrades than I have done successful upgrades. Our very first upgrade resulted in our entire system serving out pages just fine but no one could log in to anything for 3 weeks till I rolled it back. On at least two occasions the rollback has actually been at the suggestion of DNN support because of an incompatibility between our portal content (note this is content not custom modules) and a change in the software, one of those times it was months before there was a bug fix to correct the issue, that was a fault in DNN itself, and we were able to upgrade. We still haven't completed our upgrade to DNN 8 though we have been at it for 2 months due to an issue with deprecated functions and it's use by 3rd party skins (for which there was no documented fix other than changes suggested to skin designers back with DNN 6), and us trying to schedule the least disruptive time to our users since we now have to plan for at least a days outage for something that should only take minutes. We have no idea how we will be effectively able to plan and schedule the other 4 upgrades that are due out this year simply because we cannot predict whether any of them will work or what sort of outages they will cause. I would also like to note that we do indeed have a test environment for upgrade testing and even that has not helped prevent production outages due to upgrades. Lastly, while overall I have had positive experiences with the support I have received and the technicians I have dealt with have all been reasonably knowledgeable and helpful, the communication speed with support has been useless for out needs. We are currently paying for yearly support for Evoq Content Basic which only gives us access to support via a generic email or the ticketing system. While it usually only takes a day or two to get a reply from support that is much too long when your production web environment is down. Having to communicate mostly though email with the support techs has caused issues to take weeks to solve when it turns out the issue could have been solved in mere hours. For us to get access to phone support that we sometimes desperately need it would cost us more than twice the already substantial amount we pay in support yearly, and we have neither the budget nor the confidence to spend that much more on this product.