My sister-in-law delivered her 1st baby last week. As I met the newborn Charlie it formulated some thoughts that had been on my mind. I have been giving a lot of thought regarding trust. We are all born dependent and must innately trust someone else from the very beginning. It obviously continues throughout our life including our daily activities such as driving, picking out food and so on. As a software engineering firm our peers and clients trust that we can provide successful solutions. In turn we must trust our personal knowledge and experience as well as the tools and resources used daily.

Do I trust DNN; the architecture it relies upon, the source code, roadmap of the future, management, functionality, security, its’ core and outside development community? The answer is a confident, “mostly yes”. DNN’s domain represents a large and varied background of people authoring and driving it forward. Bi4ce believes enough in this community that we have invested thousands of man hours adopted DNN as a viable core solution for many of the Bi4ce systems built for our clients.

But as DNN matures it must continually maintain and build upon this trust. Testing practices, version releases, future product enhancements and the ease with which consumers attain useful information are difficult tasks to manage but critical in the maturity and impression of the DNN to worldwide based organizations making decisions right now. The recent introduction of the DNN Module Review Program is a long needed step in this direction. I hope this and other areas are expanded in the near future.

Last week I gave a presentation to a large government contractor. This organization was convinced DNN represented a strong CMS that could satisfy their needs but were extremely concerned with two things: the phrase, “Open Source” and DNN Security. In preparation for the meeting I did some research and found several DNN white papers on security (see http://dotnetnuke.com/SecurityPolicy/tabid/940/Default.aspx - scroll to the bottom) and from several other DNN community members was able to get the names of several USA government agencies using DNN. After presenting this information to the client they no longer had any issues and signed our contract. That is trust.

Chris Chodnicki
Bi4ce