Marketplace and Review Program: Year in Review
2006 was a very exciting year for DotNetNuke. We had several updates to DotNetNuke which continued to push the platform and speed adoption. The DotNetNuke Projects finally started to find their "sea legs" and are now positioned to see tremendous growth and development in 2007. After a long struggle we were finally able to launch the DotNetNuke Review Program and the DotNetNuke Marketplace. Both of these two programs have been my personal responsibility for the last year and therefore have consumed almost all of my efforts for DotNetNuke this year.
I have to admit that both of these efforts turned out to require much more work to get launched than we had originally anticipated and they are certainly taking more time to maintain on a weekly and daily basis than we were quite ready for. It has been a mixed blessing this year as developers have consistently submitted more products into the pipeline than we could handle with the resources we had available. We appreciate that vendors have been very patient with us as we seek to ramp up our efforts, and while it is not currently visible yet, I think we finally have the resources available to help us get through the backlog and keep us caught up.
Since launching the review program, we have performed more than 70 reviews. This number is expected to accelerate this next year as we expand our review program to deal with other product types and as we add additional levels to the program which represent various levels of quality and support for the DotNetNuke platform. This expansion of the review program is aimed at further differentiating vendors products and providing more information to consumers about the quality and feature set of the reviewed products.
In addition to the upcoming changes for the review program, we are also planning some big, and much needed changes to the Marketplace as well. We are just about ready to launch the MarketLink service which will provide instant notification to vendors via secure webservice, every time their product is sold in the Marketplace. In addition, we will be automating more of the submission and payment processes and in general making it easier for vendors to update and track their products and sales results in the Marketplace.
Finally, for those who have not taken advantage of the offer, there is still time to qualify for the "DotNetNuke Fourth Anniversary Giveaway". We wanted a way to say thank you to those who have supported the Review Program and the Marketplace and what better way than giving away seven Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium subscriptions. So what are you waiting for? We are going to give those seven subscriptions away to somebody. You might as well be part of that group.