It's over :(  

OpenForce 08 has come and gone.  I was really glad that I came.  The sessions were great, the access to the core team was great and most importantly the connections made with other people leveraging and using Dotnetnuke was outstanding.

The last session was a Q/A with the Core Team where we had a chance to really ask them more about the plans for the future.  I am going to do a quick type up of what they said and my impressions when they are required.

• Dotnetnuke Professional Edition has been created to be more credible on the support offering, like all other enterprise level solutions.   The Professional Edition will be a certified release for stability and security (because it will be a version or two behind the Community Edition).     There will not be two versions of the source code.  The Professional edition will come with unlimited support for the product as well as enhanced documentation and other level of servies that you expect to get from an enterprise level enviroment.  The aim here is to get corporate world to embrace Dotnetnuke as they have embraced other technologies like SQL Server, etc.
• Dotnetnuke Professional will be sold through some sort of Channel Partner scenario where the Dotnetnuke System Integrators, like Hilbert Solutions, LLC will sell the product and then be the contact business to service the Professional Edition.   Therefore, it is likely in my opinion that the Channel Partners will be providing first tier support, and other sort of oversight on the contract with the backing of Dotnetnuke Corporation.   I see this as a real win/win, assuming that Dotnetnuke will get the right Channel Partners in place.
• An FAQ will be appearing on Dotnetnuke shortly that breaks down what is included with the Professional Edition vs. the Community Edition.  No price has been set.
• Dotnetnuke is thinking about making available nightly builds to the community like other Open Source platforms do.  This could be a real advantage for those issues that you are told, "they are fixed in the next release, but you can't get that yet".
• Community building will be taking place in Q1 and Q2 08 with a focus on cleaning up Dotnetnuke.com, empowering the users more, etc.

My overall thoughts based on everything I have heard is that Dotnetnuke is positioning itself to be a viable solution for most of the basic issues that people who need a website, content management, etc will need.   Dotnetnuke will continue to include "mild" down versions of items that are currently only available from third parties into the core.  

I believe this will have a positive affect on the third party module vendor scene in that it will force the third parties to create better and better modules that do more and more in order to compete with the core.

For the end users they win because for basic requirements they will be able to leverage the core Dotnetnuke install alone. 

For more advance users they will have a better and better choice of module to choose from.

In short Dotnetnuke is growing, and with growth comes growing pains, however, I believe the road ahead is a bright path and I am eager to go along for the ride.