DNN Evoq

DotNetNuke became DNN and pivots to offer an intranet platform

Why have I seen ‘DNN’ talking about intranets so much? What’s going on? I had to find our more about this ‘not new’ intranet platform.

I was curious as to how and why ‘DotNetNuke’ become DNN and why I was seeing them talking about intranets so much in recent months. Knowing that DotNetNuke was a popular website CMS, I wondered what I’d missed. So I asked Dennis Shiao of DNN what was going on. Dennis was good enough to answer my questions, and this is his article.


Dennis ShiaoWe re-branded from DotNetNuke to DNN in 2013. We also created a brand around our commercial product line, which we call Evoq (pronounced like the verb, ‘evoke’).

[social title=”@DShiao” links=”Twitter,https://twitter.com/dshiao”]

Our software is built on Microsoft’s .NET framework and many of our customers are .NET shops. That being said, we wanted to provide our products independent of the underlying technology stack. The answer was Software as a Service (SaaS) and a fully-managed cloud offering that we call Evoq OnDemand.

While customers still deploy our software on-premises, we’re seeing strong adoption of Evoq OnDemand. So that’s the backdrop behind our decision to re-brand to ‘DNN’. And in fact, much of our community was already referring to us that way.

DNN Corp. is a privately held company headquartered in San Mateo, California. We have offices in Langley, British Columbia (Canada) and Spain. In total, we have just under 100 employees. The 2013 re-branding didn’t change the structure of our organisation.

Our core values are informed and inspired by the attributes of an open source project: openness, transparency, teamwork, and collaboration. We have a sign at headquarters that reads: “Open inspires doing. Open source means anyone has the freedom to play, create, do.”

We’re the stewards of an open source project called DNN Platform. We needed a brand around our commercial product line, which is built atop DNN Platform. The commercial products include customer support and provide features not available in the open source software. We chose the Evoq name for DNN’s commercial products. There’s a pretty simple comparison matrix on our website.

Evoq Intranet

If your intranet is used for basic content publishing and document management, Evoq Content is a fine solution. However, I think the best intranets include employee engagement and gamification features. And that’s where Evoq Engage comes in – Evoq engage offers many of the social capabilties you might expect from Yammer and other ESNs. You may have noticed that we also have Evoq Intranet pages on our website. Think of Evoq Intranet more as a use-case of our Evoq products. Our Evoq Intranet pages feature capabilities in both Evoq Content and Evoq Engage.

Click an image below to embiggen (then use your ‘back button’).

[onefourth]DNN profile[/onefourth] [onefourth]DNN Analytics[/onefourth] [onefourth]DNN activity feed[/onefourth] [onefourth last=”true”]DNN document management[/onefourth]

We’re proud to say that hundreds of customers use Evoq for their intranets. They find the page and content editing experience, the strong permissions and workflow capabilities (for intranet governance) and the engagement and gamification features to be a fine solution for their intranets.

We best satisfy these particular customer needs:

  1. Frequent page and content editing, with a growing team of content authors.
  2. A need for employee collaboration, typically across geographically diverse locations.

We have an Open API and an extensibility model well-suited to developers. So we see a lot of customers integrate Evoq with other technologies. We have a built-in connector to SharePoint, so some customers use Evoq as the CMS for their intranet. Employees can then access documents in the SharePoint repository using the intranet as the front-end. We have a native authentication using login / password with CAPTCHA challenge. We integrate with Active Directory.

Our products are priced on a subscription basis. For our cloud offering, we have different levels of pricing based on monthly page views. I’m happy to answer questions (email me: dennis.shiao@dnnsoftware.com) or I can direct queries to a member of our Sales team.

Evoq’s ‘look n feel’ can be redesigned to suit; we like to say that for both form and function, “the possibilities are endless” when using Evoq.  We have a network of certified partners. Customers often turn to this partner network for custom project work, including customising the design.

Evoq is already a tried and trusted intranet platform. We have hundreds of customers using Evoq for their intranets. While not an intranet per se, the U.S. Department of Defense places their trust in us: they have hundreds of public-facing websites running Evoq.

Currently, our Sales team is based exclusively in the U.S. We have numerous avenues to support UK clients, including phone and email. In addition, two of our partners in the UK are Cantarus and Glanton. They’ve both done numerous implementations of Evoq for customers.

Logo Evoq Intranet

[custom_carousel autoplay=”5000″ transition=”fade”] [carousel_item] DNN profile [/carousel_item] [carousel_item] DNN Analytics [/carousel_item] [carousel_item] DNN activity feed [/carousel_item] [carousel_item] DNN document management [/carousel_item] [carousel_item] DNN workflow [/carousel_item] [/custom_carousel]
[cta button_text=”Achieve Intranet Success by Avoiding These Common Mistakes” button_url=”http://www.dnnsoftware.com/resources/webinars/achieve-intranet-success-by-avoiding-these-common-mistakes/view/webinar/time/upcoming” animation=”true” button_style=”transparent” button_color=”purple”]Join us for an upcoming intranet webinar! Sam Marshall will present a DNN webinar on March 17, 2016.[/cta]

Dennis ShiaoDennis Shiao is a content marketer at DNN Corp and knows everything that customers need from a collaborative CMS. Read his blog articles and follow Dennis on Twitter.

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