The DotNetNuke community is composed of individuals and organizations that serve a wide range of needs for DotNetNuke users. Whether it is the skin designer, module developer or web hoster, every part of the DotNetNuke ecosystem helps make it easy for our users to take full advantage of the DotNetNuke platform to run their website. In this series of posts I’ll be focusing on the hosters in our community and looking at some capabilities that make each of them unique.
PowerDNN has made quite a name for themselves in our community and like any good business they look for ways to solve customer problems. To simplify management of customer accounts, PowerDNN developed the PowerDNN Control Suite. In addition to using the tool internally, PowerDNN makes the Control Suite available to their Enterprise cloud customers.
The Control Suite is a windows application that greatly simplifies many common tasks associated with managing your DotNetNuke installation. Do you need to upgrade your site to the latest version of DNN? Fix file permissions on your site? Check your site for malicious files? Backup your files and database? Clone your system so you can do a trial upgrade? All of these capabilities and more exist within the tool.
Every task is straightforward and the tool does it’s best to prevent the user from accidentally destroying data. For example, when attempting to upgrade to the latest version of DotNetNuke, the tool will by default perform a complete backup of the site. If the upgrade fails for any reason, it is just a couple clicks to restore the site to it’s previous state.
When I first saw Tony Valenti demonstrate the control suite last year, I was very impressed with how much thought has gone into various parts of the tool. One example of this is that during upgrades the system displays the DotNetNuke packages that are needed if you follow the recommended upgrade path. The system also highlights if your current version of DotNetNuke contains security issues which would necessitate an upgrade.
This tool is just one of many reasons why I think DotNetNuke hosters are some of the best in the industry. Over the coming weeks I’ll be highlighting other hosters in our community and some of the unique capabilities and tools that they offer.