I've spent a lot of time over the last little while looking at the various CMS systems available for the Windows platform and I have to say, it's a rather sad state of affairs if you want a Windows / ASP based CMS.

First, let me explain why I'm looking for an ASP based CMS. My background is primarily focused on Windows and other Microsoft based technologies. Now, I'm not saying that I won't use stuff from other companies. I ran OS2 (2, 2.1, and 3 - Warp) and I've run various versions of Linux, developed using Fortran, Pascal, C, and others. However, I learned a long time ago, that focusing on Microsoft based technologies would mean my skill set was available to the broadest audience. My point is not that any one is better than the other. Just that it makes sense to focus your skills on the broadest platform. So when it comes to picking a technology for my site, it makes sense to pick something that I'm familiar with in case I find the desire or need to roll up my sleeves and dive in to fix or add on something.

So, with that out of the way, lets talk about the tools available on the market.  There's a number of CMS tools, but only a few that are catching on or have caught on.  To start, there's Community Server from telligent, Dot Net Nuke from the Dot Net Nuke Corporation, Graffiti also from telligent, SiteFinity from Telerik, BlogEngine.net, and probably a couple more, but these are the main ones.  Of course, there's no perfect system - every product is going to have its own pro's and con's. It really comes down to what system offers you the most advantages with the least number of negatives.  I'll list each of these systems and where the limitations are from my perspective. 

I'll start with Community Server, after all it's the biggest system on the ASP side of things.  CS originally had a free and enterprise version, and as I recall, the enterprise offering was pretty affordable.  Something in the $299 - $599 range. All in all, a well priced package that offered lots of flexibility for anyone looking to build a community based on Microsoft technology. The product has evolved over the years and it now offers an excellent feature set that can be hard to match in other systems.  On the negative side, it can be slow and bloated at times, especially if you're looking to start out with a simple blog or forums (That's where their Graffiti product comes in to play, more on that later). The "Express" or free version of CS shakes down as follows: 1 Community with the CS badge showing on all pages, not for commercial use, support for Ads but limited to revenue less than $500 per month, and a maximum of 15 Blogs and 15 Forums. 

If you're launching a small personal site, then none of these should be a big deal.  However, if you're launching a community site and have plans on growing the site, then there are serious limitations here.  The biggest issues are the commercial use and the ad revenue restriction.  Once your site has grown to any significant size, you're going to have to purchase a valid CS license. Ok, so that's no big deal, your site is growing and you now need to buy a full CS license - most people would welcome that.  So let's check out the price of CS. There are 3 versions to pick from, Pro, Intranet, and Enterprise and the prices are $3,000, $50 per user/minimum of 200 users, and $20,000 per server - ouch! To be fair, most of the time you're going to look at the Pro product as it's has less of the enterprise features like Exchange and AD support and those aren't really needed in the online community sites. But $3,000? From free to $3,000?  That's a pretty big jump if you ask me. I'm not against buying software - in fact, I'm in the business of selling software, that's my day job.  What I don't like, is the idea that my site or community has reached a level of popularity and now all of a sudden it's going to cost me $3K to stay within a valid license. That alone has killed CS for me.  I want the ability for my site to grow without a ridiculous fee tagged on to it.

On to the next application - Since I've already talked about telligent, I might as well continue and mention their Graffiti tool. Once again, telligent shows that they can create a powerful application that's easy to use at an affordable price - free.  But once again, they label it with restrictions that worry me. The free edition is limited non-commercial use and just 3 content publishers, so that means me and two others.  Once I have a 4th person that wants to post content I need to buy a retail version. So what's the retail cost? Well, it's not as bad as CS.  This time you can get a Single Site Edition for 10 or 25 content publishers for $399/$799 respectively or a Server Edition for 10 or 25 for $5,000/$7,500.

Now, the $399 package could work for most sites for a long time. But to be honest, I've already got a bad taste in my mouth from the prices and limitations that telligent has placed on these products and I'm concerned about things changing in the future. So I've pretty much written off Graffiti.

Next on the list is Dot Net Nuke. There's no issues with price when it comes to DNN because it's free as free can be. Of course, free means that nobody is getting paid to develop and work on the project.  So everyone is a volunteer and working on their spare time.  Which is great, I like that people believe in a product so much that they can give their time to better it.  Thanks to the price, there's no risk of having to pay more if my site happens to become popular. So where's the problem? Well, the lack of a full time development team means that the features and functionality are less than what you find on other applications. Let's take a quick look at the blogging module; Friendly URLs or SEO optimized URLs - Nope, Tags for posts - Nope, Categories for posts - Nope, Quick to load - Nope, Support for avatars and blog ratings - Nope and Nope. The list goes on for a while, so I'll stop here instead of boring you with all the ugly details.  It's a great platform that offers a lot of power and customization features, but it's seriously missing some major features.

So, that brings us to SiteFinity from Telerik. SiteFinity is a smaller up and coming CMS tool.  It offers 2 versions a free community version and a $899 Standard edition.  I can't comment on the features or overall usability of the product because I never actually got installed. Why not? Well, to install SiteFinity, you need to publish it to your server or hosting company through Visual Studio.  Now, there is a free version of Visual Studio, so everyone has access to the tools that are needed to do this. However, I'm not sure that everyone wants to go through the process.  For me, I just want to upload it and be done.  I don't see the need to build the project and publish it using VS.  That, to me, sounds like a unpolished product.  I should be able to manage and update the site without having to open my development tools and republish the site.

And now we get to BlogEngine.net - a relatively new addition to the scene. BlogEngine.Net is free and offers some nice features, but much like SiteFinity, it also has some serious drawbacks.  The biggest is the simple fact that there is no way to install this in a hosted environment. The install procedure requires that you run a SQL script against your database. I don't know many hosting providers that grant access to run SQL scripts directly against the database.  If BlogEngine could get itself an installer routine - much like SiteFinity needs, then they could really expand their market. 

After a lot of searching, I finally found a solution that offers everything I'm looking for.  It's free - 100% free with no hidden costs if my site happens to grow and ads start to pay off. It's also fast to load, offers Tags, Categories, SEO optimized URLs, quick and easy install, and generally easy to use.  The only thing it's missing is that it's not ASP based.  That's right, in the end it's come down to WordPress, the PHP based CMS tool that is taking the online communities by storm.  After seeing all the features that are missing from other products, it's no wonder that WordPress is as popular as it is.

I know everyone won't agree with what my thoughts and comments on the various platforms, but if there is anything you can take away from this - be sure you understand your customer and their needs as well as what the competition has to offer. I hope that this can be different in the future.

The final word from all this: Stay tunned for a special announcement on a new site from yours truly - coming real soon.

I can't help but feel pissed that I scratched my phone.The phone is only 5 months old - which is a life time for me, but it doesn't deserve this horrible fate.  Thankfully, I had a screen protector on and that looks to have taken a large amount of the damage.  Although, I haven't peeled it back to see if there is any damage under it.  It doesn't look like that's the case.

So how did this happen you ask? Well, during the MVP Summit earlier this month, I was riding the bus between the hotel and Microsoft's campus and was lucky enough to have a window seat.  Unfortunately, I didn't see there was a screw sticking out of the side of the bus and towards the side pocket on my cargo's.  My phone was hanging out in that pocket and the screw managed to do it's best work.

The worst part of this whole thing is that everytime I look at my phone, all I can see is this giant scratch starring right back at me.   There's nothing to do now but wait for CNN.cn to offer a new casing for the BlackJack II.  Then I can perform surgery and return it back to new.

Geez, NDA's can really ruin a great thing, eh?  I so want to share the all the awesome details with everyone, but it's too early. 

I promise to share all the details as soon as possible. ;)

Yup, got me a new gadget - Thanks Easter Bunny.   I just returned from Henry's with a new Nikon D60 along with a couple of lenses. It wasn't an easy choice for me, considering that I know very little about DSLR cameras.  So I have to give thanks to everyone on the Mobius list that provided info and thoughts on what to get.  I'm pretty excited about the new camera and I'm looking forward to learning a lot more about pictures.

I plan on adding a nice Marco lens along with a couple filters in the future. So my device shots should look a whole lot better! Oh, and I guess at some point I'll need to upgrade my camera bag too. It's a slippery slope.  I'll have to take things slowly and make sure I'm not just wasting my money. Alright, enough of this; time to get these toys out of the box and start some serious playing.

Yeah, I know it's more than a quarter of a century old, but I have finally defeated the beast - better known as Rubik's Cube.  And this time it was solved without taking it apart.  I know what you're thinking, and the answer is No, I haven't been working on it all these years.  As a young lad I spent some time understanding how the puzzle worked (read take apart and re-assembling).  It's only recently that this puzzle has re-entered my life and this time I decided I needed to solve the challenge the correct way.  Now that I have, it's time to put it away and get back to the more important things in life.    

The guys at Zumobi have managed to work some agreement with Microsoft where they will be distributing their browser with Windows Mobile devices.  Overall, I would say this is a darn good thing, as the Zumobi interface is very cool.  It breaks things up into tiles and allows you to quickly and easily move between sites. The best part is that Zumobi is free.  Just make sure you have a good data plan as it looks like there's a lot of data usage to get this working just right. You can download a copy directly from the Zumobi site. I have it installed on my device and so far, it's nice.  We'll see how it measures up to daily usage

The menus are also a little weird at time, as it's meant for numeric entry and I can do so much more with my BlackJack II.  I'm sure better keyboard support will come with time. As a side note, you should be aware that using Zumobi means that the sites you read are being filtered through the Zumobi servers allowing them to manipulate the pages for the best possible display for your device.

Ok, this is just getting painful to watch - RIM has managed to have another major outage on their BlackBerry network.  As I'm sure everyone is aware, this isn't the first, second, or third time it's happened.  Heck, I've even posted about the last on here. So here's a snippet from the latest Reuters news posting on the issue:

"A major outage hit BlackBerry users in North America on Monday afternoon, cutting off wireless e-mail for everyone from busy executives to political campaign staff on the eve of three U.S. presidential primaries. The problem, which BlackBerry owner Research In Motion described as a "critical severity outage" affecting users in the Americas, once again raised concerns about the stability of the e-mail service 10 months after a widespread crash last April." Source = Reuters

It's worth noting, that this outage doesn't cut off wireless email for everyone - just those that have bought into the centralized NOC design that RIM offers.  If you're using Microsoft's Direct Push then this won't affect you - unless you're trying to email someone that has a BlackBerry device.