Site Sync, only for Enterprise?

Hi There,
The release notes aren't specific, but based on the following link  http://www.sitefinity.com/purchase.aspx it would appear that the Site Sync feature is only available to Enterprise Licenses. Is this indeed true and will it remain this way? Seems like such a waste of such a good feature to limit to an exclusive few.

Regards,
Phill

It's been a while since I've been excited about a new sitefinity version.. that was short lived. Unfortunately the newsletter appears to be intentionally vaguely worded. The 11 Sitefinity 4 Professional/Standard licenses we have purchased so far would all benefit from site sync. This seems like a ridiculously arbitrary placement for a feature that can only be used to the extent of your license..

You guys need to step back and put some real focus on productivity at the agency/partner developer level. Maintaining 10-20 Sitefinity sites in a staging, production environment is a huge burden on everyone involved.

Phil,
I posed this very same question a few weeks back and was told - Enterprise Only. http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/forums/sitefinity-4-x/general-discussions/support-for-deployment-and-promotion.aspx

This is one feature I believe should be available in all versions as to me, it seems a fundamental cornerstone of a CMS. Far more so than eCommerce..

justin

The sad thing is that the price differential between the Standard, Pro, and Enterprise version is so large that I can't see anyone upgrading to get this feature.  It really penalizes those of us who from a resources standpoint, could benefit from it most.

@Telerik:

Please consider adding this to the Standard and Pro versions.

Steve

I want to add my voice here as well. At least make site synchronization available as an add-on for standard and professional. I might even argue that it should be standard for professional.

Until now we didn't realize that site sync is enterprise only. This should really be a standard feature. Another very disappointing decision.
Mathias

Hello everyone,

The Site Sync feature is also available as an add-on to the Professional Edition at 3999$. The purchase page will be updated accordingly as soon as possible.

Thank you for taking the time to share your opinion and concerns regarding our decisions on the Site Sync license limitations.

Hi Hristo,

Ouch, 50% of the cost of the professional license--a bit steep, no.  Not to mention that it completely ignores standard user licenses--not that I could afford it given this pricing model anyway. 

This brings the following to mind: what are Telerik's recommendations for syncing changes between dev, staging, and production servers?

Steve

Hi guys,

I want to apologize on behalf of the Sitefinity team at Telerik for not communicating the licensing of the SiteSync feature as well as expected. This should be reflected on our roadmap, release notes and purchase page. We did the last two with a day's delay and we failed to reflect that in the roadmap the way we did with ecommerce with the 4.2 release. I can assure you that nothing was "intentionally vaguely worded". We would never do that because this would not benefit anyone.
There are ways of synchronizing different environments and I'll let the product/support team comment on a recommended approach through third party tools. I can relate to the requests of having all features in all editions.I was trying to convince my car dealer that climatronic and xenon lights should be standard equipment because comfort and good visibility are very important and common to all clients. Just like in this case regular AC and lights come as standard and the extra convenience costs more, in the case of SiteSync the same thing can be achieved through third party tools and some manual work and everyone can chose whether the extra convenience is worth it or not. We are serving a large pool of clients and partners who have very different needs and requirements. We always try to serve the majority as best as we can, but it's not easy to please everyone and i hope you can understand that.

Thanks,
Martin Kirov
the Telerik Team

P.S. @ Drew - "Maintaining 10-20 Sitefinity sites in a staging, production environment is a huge burden on everyone involved. " - this is what Sitefinity Thunder comes to facilitate. Stay tuned for the initial release in February(and yes - it will be a free VS plug-in available to everyone)

@Martin

Good car example. I love those as some of you might know. And again its a business descition Telerik is free to make.

But I can add to what Drew is saying. Updating SF sites can be done very easely manualy. I got my 20 point list and it works quite well and in about 1 hour I am usually done.
BUT the testing is another thing. 4.4 for example seems to add extra <br />. Just small issue but can be a design breaker. So if you find out things like this after 0.5 to 1 hours testing you end up doing the update process again with the hotfix maybe.

So if you have 20 site you probably spend a whole week works updating. Not much if you are a firm of 5-20. If you are alone you have one week gone. And sometimes I don't really feel I can bill the client for updates because they might just be importent for bug fixes.

Looking forward to see Thunder will bring. Thanks for the great work SF really is coming along sweet.

Markus

"and yes - it will be a free VS plug-in available to everyone".

Be sure to point out that you can make great fully featured modules, but that it's functionality is limited to the license you own. Just to make sure you don't create those vague expectations!

Still also a bit disappointed about not having this sync feature. If you navigate on sitefinity.com as a new visitor you might expect that this 'awesome' CMS system is having all those great options (ecommerce, site sync, multilangual, form builder) in one CMS, but when you go to purchase you finally discover that to have it all, you should invest $ 20.000,-. Think that it is better to be clear about it from the start.

Regards,
Daniel

Yeah for the add-on, but ouch on the price!

Thanks for the reply Martin. Car metaphors are way overused and not really relevant for a onetime production cost industry like software but i get what you are trying to say. As an aside, I just sat with the Module builder for about an hour. It's a huge improvement over the previous process and makes the upgrade feel "worth it". In my opinion, this finally brings sitefinity back on par with 3.7 level of productivity. I'm glad to see you guys(Telerik) are still alive in there and I hope Thunder is worthy of the effort.
Cheers,
Drew

Hello,

Please check our roadmap - http://www.sitefinity.com/web-content-management/roadmap.aspx - it outlines the upcoming features with more details. We are looking forward to releasing these new features as well!