Summary

DotNetNuke Marketplace

The extensibility model in DotNetNuke spawned an active commercial ecosystem. By January 2006, there were hundreds of commercial modules and skins available for the DotNetNuke application. In addition, there were many companies who were providing business services exclusively to the DotNetNuke market. This dynamic ecosystem was helping propel the growth of the project, but it was not without its share of issues.

Early in project's history, a third party created a reseller environment that allowed developers to sell their DotNetNuke products to consumers. This made it extremely easy for anyone, from a hobbyist developer to a serious independent software vendor, to get involved in the DotNetNuke commercial ecosystem. In the early stages, the existence of an established business environment for commercial components was critical to the growth of the project and promotion of the "abundance mentality." However, one of the most common types of negative feedback that we received related to this environment as time went on was about the quality of third-party products and services.

Based on the low barrier of entry of the reseller environment, the quality of commercial DotNetNuke components was extremely inconsistent. Some vendors were providing high-quality components, with professional support, and explicit licensing terms. Others were essentially providing untested code snippets with no support or licensing considerations. The combination of these polar opposites in terms of product quality posed some real issues in terms of our goals to promote DotNetNuke as an enterprise-level framework. Effectively, the existing reseller environment was supporting a "buyer beware" mentality that was not complementary with our goals for taking the project to the next level. Some of the more serious independent software vendors told us that for them to get involved in the ecosystem, a more professional reseller channel would need to be made available.

One of the issues that we struggled with for quite some time was the creation of some review criteria for DotNetNuke components. This became increasingly more critical as many of the DotNetNuke Projects entered the release pipeline. Leveraging the revenue from the Benefactor Program, I was finally able to fund this effort, and Joe Brinkman was selected as the best resource for the task. The review criteria played a fundamental role in our internal organizational process, but we also had another strategic goal in mind.

The current reseller environment was managed by a third party. We had approached them a number of times in the past with hopes that we could form a business partnership. The critical points were that we were not receiving any revenue from the DotNetNuke ecosystem we created, and we were not collecting any business intelligence related to the users of the product. For us to effectively manage the product roadmap, it was becoming increasingly more important that we get in touch with our true user community. The discussion forums represented a small-but-vocal group of community members who offered feedback, but there was a much larger group of users with whom we had absolutely no contact. Unfortunately, the reseller was not interested in working with us in this capacity, which left us with a single alternative: establishing our own reseller channel.

Combining the concepts of the review criteria with a reseller channel seemed to be a great way to satisfy a variety of project goals. Our reseller channel would only sell components that passed our objective review criteria. This improved the overall perception of quality and confidence in the community, provided us with the necessary business intelligence, and exposed a new revenue stream to help us secure more dedicated management resources.