DotNetNuke World 2012 Event Recap

In early October, some of our team got the wonderful opportunity to attend DotNetNuke World which is the annual user conference specifically designed for developers, web designers, administrators, business decision makers, and end users on the DotNetNuke Platform.

We headed up to the event on the afternoon of Wednesday, October 10th and got to discuss the new happenings with DNN at the welcome reception we sponsored. It was great to have the opportunity to get to know the DNN core team, partners, and users in a relaxed setting, outside in beautiful Orlando, FL. The DotNetNuke team also did a wonderful job with the catering, décor, and band for the event.

After getting to know everybody a bit better at the welcome reception, we headed out to watch the Baltimore Orioles game with some partners from R2integrated, PointClick Technologies, and Arrow Consulting & Designs. For those of you who don’t know, the DNN World theme this year was super heroes and as luck would have it there was a balloon artist at the establishment who made a wonderful Incredible Hulk balloon man for us to use at our booth for the conference.

This amazing balloon man was a huge hit among conference attendees and it was even larger than me! The balloon artist spent about two hours and 93 balloons to create this and it was quite the effort figuring out how we were going to fit this huge creature into the car and get it to the conference center, without popping any key balloons. (It’s not so bad that he lost a few fingers, right?)

The first official day of the conference started out with a wonderful keynote presentation by DotNetNuke’s CEO, Navin Nagiah. The room was filled with excitement about the direction of DNN and their past accomplishments along the way.

Later that day, our very own CEO, Jess Coburn, gave an in-depth presentation on scaling DNN in the cloud, which included several different options for scaling your DotNetNuke portal in the cloud, covered a range of hosting solutions, and the ideal configurations of both the infrastructure and the application.

On Thursday night, we attended DNN After Dark, the official superhero party and contest winner announcements. Thanks to your help and the community, our client Hilton Grand Vacations won site of the year for their mobile site developed by Arrow Consulting & Design. Plus we even came in second place for the DNN SuperFan competition!

Towards the end of the conference, I participated in the DNN Ignite presentations which are structured presentations with slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds. The first speaker, Nik Kalyani, was an absolutely engaging speaker that I highly recommend watching. Now, even though I’ve never seen Star Trek, this presentation was a really neat way to discuss user experience.

 

After watching him speak, my nerves went from nonexistent to overwhelming in seconds flat. Honestly, how do you follow that? Regardless, I survived my presentation and learned a lot from Nik and the other fabulous speakers in the Ignite session, so next year I’ll be stepping up my game.

Throughout the conference, we had the chance to talk to many DNN users and learn more about their success and pain points when it comes to hosting. It was also wonderful getting the opportunity to get some face-to-face time with many of our current customers including Convergence Health and Hilton Grand Vacations.

Overall the event was a great experience and we’re very thankful to DotNetNuke for having us participate.