Without a doubt, one of the hottest industry trends in recent years is the rise of the Social Web. Whether this means participation in some of the massively successful social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, or it involves taking advantage of social collaboration software within your enterprise, the demand for online social interaction continues to grow at an incredible pace.
One aspect which has been critical to the success of the DotNetNuke platform over the years is the ability to stay abreast of modern technology trends. Sometimes this is accomplished through strategic enhancements to the core platform, but often it is accomplished through our vibrant extensions ecosystem where thousands of developers offer innovative solutions to everyday business problems.
In the social area, one particular vendor saw the opportunity it represented at a very early stage and created some very feature rich and highly successful commercial products which extended the social capabilities of the DotNetNuke platform. The vendor initially started with one of the pillars of social collaboration, an interactive discussion forum, and later augmented the solution to include many additional social capabilities including friends, groups, user activity, and a rich user profile.
Those of you who are familiar with the DotNetNuke ecosystem should be able to identify this vendor as Active Modules. Active Modules Inc. is based out of Charleston, South Carolina and was originally founded by Will Morgenweck, a seasoned entrepreneur with a proven knack for creating highly usable commercial software solutions for enterprise clients. Active Modules has been providing advanced social collaboration products for DotNetNuke since 2004 and has always been a proud sponsor and loyal supporter of the DotNetNuke community.
A number of months ago, Will Morgenweck reached out to us to determine if DotNetNuke Corporation may be interested in acquiring some of his company's intellectual property. After some initial discussion, it became clear that his primary motivation was all about working together to accelerate the growth of the DotNetNuke ecosystem, and he felt the best way to accomplish this was by adding more social functionality to the base platform so that it would be more relevant and competitive in the broad CMS market. This rationale made a lot of sense to us, as we were actively looking for ways to significantly increase our product value as well as capitalize on hot market trends.
With this background in mind, I am very excited to make the public announcement today that DotNetNuke Corporation has officially acquired Active Modules. In addition to the valuable intellectual property we receive as part of this deal, I am also very excited that Will Morgenweck will be joining our team immediately as Director of Social Products.
DotNetNuke Corporation is no stranger to acquisitions, as we have successfully completed a number of strategic deals over the past few years. During that time we also learned some valuable lessons on how to best approach the integration effort; the most important being the need for very clear, detailed communication with all affected stakeholders.
First and foremost, we will not be removing the popular Active Forums or Active Social products from the market. They will continue to be available on our marketplace at Snowcovered.com until such time that they are properly and fully integrated with our other product editions. Customers, both existing and new, will receive the same high quality of support they have come to expect from the Active Modules team and will be provided an upgrade path to assure the longevity of their investment.
Now please allow me to clarify something... the fact that DotNetNuke Corporation is making Active Forums and Active Social available as commercial modules on Snowcovered does not mean that we are planning on getting into the commercial module business. We stand by our previous commitment that we are focused on delivering complete business solutions to customers and do not intend to offer any of our premium extensions as stand alone products. In this specific case we are simply trying to ensure that users can still access the advanced functionality of the Active Modules tools while we work through the IP acquisition.
In regards to the ultimate fate of the individual Active Modules products, the award-winning Active Forums module will become an open source product and will ultimately replace the DNN Forum module ( an upgrade path will be provided for users of the DNN Forum ). This represents a huge win for the community, as Active Forums boasts a variety of professional features which are currently not available in the DNN Forum project. Active Social will be strategically evaluated and the majority of its individual components will be integrated with the core platform to provide a rich foundation for building advanced social experiences. Lastly Active Purchase, a streamlined e-commerce solution which has been under development by Active Modules for a number of years, will be made available exclusively as part of the Professional and Enterprise Editions in DotNetNuke 6.0.
Please join me in congratulating Will Morgenweck and welcoming him to our team!