Anant.Public.Community

I've been observing a lot of software and I know that there are thousands of ways to improve them. I would like to start with Open Source software specially because there are lots of hard working open source developers who make decent software but need assistance on making it marketable.

Open Source software fails because they aren't able to compete in the market place because of either a lack of resources or because a lack of adoption.

For the purpose of analysis, I will focus on and evaluate Rainbow and DotNetNuke and post my findings. I have used past DNN releases and have been consistently using Rainbow for a while. Don't expect a weighted observation towards either because my improvements most likely will apply to both.

Application construction is changing for businesses. Software cannot be made like it was made a decade ago. Technology is consistently improving from many different vendors and a little of each can be used to make great solutions.

Portals and such have been cropping up in use for a long time. I saw the beginnings around the time that portals.com ( I think thats what it was called ) plunged down in stock. It's ironic that I'm talking about them because I see the usage of portals/cms systems almost everywhere that real business is conducted.

The internet empowers business people to do just more than what they do , but also to do business together with others over the internet. Yahoo, one of the major portals out there right now serves millions of users. There are people talking on Yahoo Groups. There are people doing business on there. There are even people posting their blogs and family pictures using Flikr. ( Wow what a great product!).

Small businesses can now start putting up interesting storefronts and client areas which they wouldn't have been able to do with anything else. Dreamweaver? That's an advanced user tool. FrontPage? Are you kidding me? My friend Charles used it just to edit files because of its' ability to open a "web". I agree, that was a nice way to edit files remotely.

With Rainbow and DNN, you can do that without have ANY software on your machine. The software runs on the internet. Administrators install it (or your hosting company is cool and has an installer), and you are set to go.

It's too bad that people who build these solutions have to spend so much time creating pages, adding modules manually everytime. This process needs to be revised. Module development also takes way too long. It is not efficient. So many of the same steps have to be done over and over again. Code generators help a little, but they aren't exactly what I want to see while developing.

Module Development

The module development process involves designing a table in the database, creating providers, creating interfaces, hooking up events. UGH. Well I can deal with this now because I've been dealing with it for a while. I think there are better ways to do this.

Portal Construction The portal construction process is less than fun. You have to do a thousand clicks before you actually have anything tangible. The people doing business don't want to be creating portals, they want to their jobs. The people who want to be constructing portals should have better tools to serve the business community. Portal Deployment Once you build a Portal, its just sitting there. You have to back up the database, send it over, restore the database, and then configure the application. ( You also have to copy the files over). Installation should be a lot easier than it is. GUYS, COME ON! CommunityServer.org's installation is SO easy compared to DNN and Rainbow.

Those are probably the three main things I see that need improvement for the system administrators, developers, and portal constructors.

Since so many different types of end users can use the software, how they interact with the software from their end has to fit what their goals are. Currently, alot of the Modules I see are glorified database edit screens with some nifty intertwined business logic or validation. I know the difficulties from the backend, and I'll have to think before I post about how to improve the interface. Rahul