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Top 3 things I learned during the AUG’s Virtual Partner Showcase

By Nancy Leslie posted 10-21-2011 08:58

  

Lot's of great presentations and exciting ideas were presented during the Partner Showcase this week.  Here are a few of the things I learned:

  1. E-web is not dead—leveraging the built in E-web  hooks is some of the power behind Netforum and  many of the Partners can help expand your capabilities
  2. Baseline, Baseline, Baseline—As more functionality is moved into the Netforum software-strategic customization of Netforum becomes important or  you’ll be spending dollars to remove what you did last year
  3. Whatever you need—Consulting, Training, Coaching, Customization, Integration—can be found in the Netforum partner space-- you just need to know who to ask

What were your take aways?

 

 

 

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Comments

Nancy Leslie
11-02-2011 16:29

Darryl,
I think we all understand that Netforum has to be a balance-- but I have to agree with Chuck that it takes a lot of resources to implement eweb. Our entire site is built in it- so we have experienced the complicated learning curve. Because most folks customize it extensively and have strong technical staff - lots of time the small issues and bugs don't get addressed leaving small organizations like us at a severe disadvantage-- and pulling our hair out. Having said all that --the intergration that eweb gives is immeasurable and allows us to leverage our resources to provide better service for our members.

Darryl Hopkins
11-02-2011 10:50

Chuck, thanks for your feedback on eWeb. Any software has to strike a balance between flexibility/power and simplicity. The best solutions manage to do both well. With eWeb, we've tried to make a powerful platform that can do many things but it you need something heavily personalized it can take development work to make this happen. To see some of the myriad designs and functionality that people have done in eWeb, just google "eWeb/StartPage.aspx" and you'll see a huge variety.
The baseline out-of-the-box site was designed to be a starter template but it should be able to work for most associations most of the time.
If you have any specific suggestions, please pass them along and we'll try to address them.

Chuck Szymaszek
11-01-2011 12:57

Hi Nancy, first of all thanks for putting this together, great idea!
On your blog, while I agree EWEB is not dead, I do believe that anyone using it now or is in the process of getting it fired up is in for alot of out of pocket expenses to make it work right. I have yet to talk to someone who has used it out of the box for their solution. While I understand that EWEB cannot fit the bill out of the box for everyone, I still would have thought it would have been better "out of the box"
I will tell you this.. it is a ugly can of worms... and requires alot of IT support, which small associations do not have..
Baseline is great, but unfortunately most of all associations require some changes that will need mods. It is not they cannot change their ways, it is just the nature of the beast.
The Partners are great, I have talked to some of them, but I am still leery of the fact that during a patch or upgrade things can get left behind and cause more problems than good.
Just my 2 cents..
Chuck