PDC has now come & gone and there were several interesting announcements from the conference. However, in the short-term, I’m not sure life will be very different for many developers. In the next few years, however, I expect cloud computing will yield some interesting opportunities.
One of the most valuable parts of the conference was simply being able to talk to many developers about Sitefinity. I’m very anxious to get feedback and understand what features would be most useful to developers. Here are some of the frequently asked questions I received from PDC:
- Does Sitefinity work with cloud services?
Because of Microsoft’s Azure announcement, many people wanted to know how Sitefinity might work with cloud services. I was learning about Microsoft Azure along with everyone else. My PDC attendance will give me access to experiment with Azure and I’ll certainly attempt to use Sitefinity in this new cloud services environment. As of this writing, I’m unsure how easy or hard this might be. I’ll report on this topic when I have more information. - How does Sitefinity handle deployment?
Deploying Sitefinity to a production server currently involves the transfer of many files. Better deployment tools for Sitefinity are already being investigated for the 4.0 release. - Does Sitefinity scale?
Performance & scalability were concerns as well. In this regard, the Telerik.com web site is providing a wonderful case study. Telerik.com is being recreated and will be launching in the coming weeks. This web site is being launched on the Sitefinity platform and many of the performance enhancements found in Sitefinity 3.5 were a direct result of optimizations that were needed for Telerik.com. - How does Sitefinity integrate with SharePoint?
We absolutely want to build a collaborative story with SharePoint and I know we have customers who are already using Sitefinity with SharePoint. But we are also investigating ways to make this integration even easier. If anyone has thoughts or suggestions, please email me. - What’s coming with 4.0?
The exact feature list is still being discussed. However, we know for sure that Telerik’s new OpenAccess ORM will be part of Sitefinity 4.0. We’re also looking at better deployment tools and making it easy to customize and manage Sitefinity.
This was the first time I’ve ever worked a trade show booth. I’m not a sales guy and my first few conversations were a challenge. “So what’s good about Sitefinity?” How do I answer this question coherently in 30 seconds? In the end, I started telling everyone how I personally discovered Sitefinity 2 years ago. I needed a CMS and I was trying to choose between “building my own” and “using an existing product”. Building a CMS from scratch is tedious & boring. But using an existing CMS often limits the customizations that can be made.
Sitefinity presented the best of both approaches. It had a lot of features out of the box that I didn’t need to build. But Sitefinity was also based entirely on normal ASP.NET conventions. This meant I could use technologies I was already using (Master Pages, Themes, UserControls, etc.) to easily extend & customize my web site. In many ways, Sitefinity felt more like a framework than a CMS.
A huge “features” list is nice to have, but the best test of a CMS is how easily you can create your own features. This is where I want Sitefinity to continue to shine. I want developers to be comfortable building their solutions on top of Sitefinity and I never want developers to feel “trapped” or “powerless”.
Thanks to everyone who stopped by the Telerik booth. It was great getting to meet each of you in person!