Sitefinity 4.0 RC

Feels like Christmas today.

For everyone reading this thread - I'm embedding my comments within the posts.

Best,
Vassil Terziev
CEO/Telerik

VT>> I am glad you like the new version. I am pretty sure that once you start working with 4.0 you'll appreciate it even more. And you'll see why it took us so long to ship it. It was a big investment for the future - not just for us, but for our customers as well.

It's like Santa put Analytics under the tree, but then said I had to pay $6k for it.  Bah-humbug.

VT>> We decided that we'll seriously consider adding the Analytics to ALL editions. Over time, we will add additional Analytics features to the Standard and higher editions that will not be available in SBE and Community.

I asked in the webinar if we could just purchase the analytics (for less than $6000, hopefully). So far the answer is no. Maybe if enough people respond to this post, we can get them to reconsider.

Santa, er I mean, Telerik, what do you say?

VT>> Santa listened:) As I said in my first post on this thread - we are making those changes because we are seeing the validity of some requests and not because of unexpected pressure and negative comments. Some changes we'll be able to consider and hopefully accommodate, others we won't.

Oh, and he swiped that plate of Granular Permission cookies I left out.  I really wanted those.

I am disappointed about the granular permissions too.  My question is what does page level permissions amount to?  Only frontend pages or would it still be possible to setup roles with permissions to only have access to certain admin pages for say the news module or events?  I know you would not be able to set them at a item by item level.

VT>> You will be able to set permissions to both front-end and back-end pages. You will not be able to set them at an item level.

That said, we had promised granular permissions to SF 3.x customers so that's another change we'll seriously consider. Chances are high that granular permissions will appear in the Standard Edition.

Well, very nice things are coming in SF4.0! Can't wait to start with it.

I was really looking forward to granular permissions too.  In fact I sold this feature to a client since it was one of their basic requirements.  I don't think they'll spring the extra $6k at this point.  I kinda feel like I've been chasing a dangling carrot.

Agreed about being able to do things the old way with GA but Sitefinity 4.0 is all about doing things the new way. Having to manage analytics outside of the CMS for clients is just another extraneous item that takes up time that could be better spent elsewhere.

In lieu of a chant button, I've created this sophisticated piece of HTML:

<chant>GA in Sitefinity 4.0 Standard. GA in Sitefinity 4.0 Standard. GA in Sitefinity 4.0 Standard.</chant>

I agree analytics should be included in Standard at least. I would even switch it out for multi-lingual support. I mean if your a multi-national corporation, you should be making some dough. But for analytics, everyone uses it. And besides, you need analytics to grow your business right? So it would be good for buyers and sellers.

I'm still looking at this in more detail, and I couldn't get to the webinar until late but from the pricing page it seems fairly clear.

I for one am not happy with the pricing.

As someone who works for a school district to have our price jump from $720 to $20000 is rediculous.  That is more than 20 times the cost!  And the concurrent users are set to rediculous numbers too.  They force you to go for the enterprise level even if you don't need that much.

VT>> Please tell us about your case and why you need to move from $720 to $20K. As I said in an earlier comment, 10 concurrent users is a lot. Add some ingenuity around how you can take some of the publishing out of the system and make the operations short-lived, and the 10 concurrent users is not that big of a problem any more (check my comments in MattC's post).

As far as my side projects go. The limitation of 50 pages will be a breaking point I am sure for a lot of my clients and jumping from the $500 version to $2000 just to get unlimited pages with no real benefit in increased functionality is crazy.  Again a quadruple cost increase?  Really?

VT>> There aren't that many differences now. There will be in the future and you will start seeing those pretty soon. As I mentioned in another post, I'd prefer for you guys to complain today and then gradually make you happy through adding more value and not touching the price vs constantly adding value and adjusting the price accordingly.

Are you guys going to tack on another 10 grand when you finally get a shopping cart module setup and how will that play into the number of pages?

VT>> No, we are not. We will be adding all kinds of nice features across all SKUs without touching the price. That's the idea.

There are a lot of small businesses that could have hundreds of pages of products but you are forcing them to fork out $2000 for unlimited pages and you will probably require more $$ just to have that shopping cart feature.

VT>> Please give me an example of one such business that has hundreds of static pages (blogs, news, etc are counted as dynamic pages; meaning, a blog is two pages - one for the main feed and another one for individual posts) and it cannot afford a website for $2,000. I am ready to be proven wrong, but I need to see examples.

Also agree with other posters hear about the granular permissions that were promised way earlier and the analytics as well.

VT>> That one will be fixed.

I also agree with dumping the multilanguage feature for Standard Edition to lower the price.

VT>> That's another problem. Everyone is looking at the big frame just from their angle. All ideas mentioned on this thread make sense and we would like to accommodate them but many of them contradict each other. Many of those suggestions also go against the needs of many other customers. For example, multi-lingual does not matter for you but how about the website of a small restaurant in Texas where everything needs to be in Spanish and English? How about the site of a kindergarten in Switzerland or Belgium where it needs to be in several languages?

Speaking of multi-lingual, we will do just the opposite - we will add support for up to 2-3 languages in the Community and SBE editions. I hope this makes even more people happy.

Very disapointed....

We are discussing the situation tomorrow in a meeting.  We may actually be going a different way after this.

All that development time down the tubes if that is what is decided.  I'm all for making more money but 20 times as much money?????

VT>> I hope it does not. As you can see we are willing to consider well thought out  arguments that take into account our position as well. If you think your case is borderline, just contact sales and talk about your situation.

Not happy at all. Concurrent users limited to 5 for standard? What's the point? I could live without the extra stuff in the professional editions but I need more than 5 and I need more than 10 concurrent users. I definitely can't afford professional unlimited. This is a spit in the face for existing customers.

Since I started this post (albeit just to say that I was excited about Sitefinity 4.0), let's make sure we're all fighting for the items that benefit me most -- and by that I means not getting rid of multi-language, instead simply adding analytics to the standard version (and just because Jeff's posts were funny, let's add granular permissions as well) Mulitlanguage is an important piece that should not be removed from the Standard edition.

And here's my two cents on the pricing overall. Yes the jump from 3.7 to the new equivalent seems a bit high (to be clear, from $900 to $2000, not $500 to $2000), but this product is vastly superior to anything else we've ever used and actually saves many, many hours of development time. If a client balks at the price increase, then the $500 version is available. If that same client still balks because of concurrent users tell them to use DNN and see where that gets everybody. Seriously don't do that. Really this is a great product and it's still at a fair price ($1499 would be fairer :). And I for one think that any one who has as many nice thing to say about a product as I do thinks Analytics should be included in a Standard edition.

VT>> Just like you, I would also urge everyone to consider the whole value equation. You can't compare only price, or only features, or any single element for that matter. We'll be doing a lot of webinars in the coming months to show you how good SF 4.0 really is and how many great things you can do with it. I know that no one likes price increases but once you see how much more productive you can be and what amazing features you can add without even writing code, you will start looking at all editions in a very different way.

Again, to reiterate:
Multilanguage = Good. VT>> Check!
Analytics = Good VT>> Check!
Granular Permission = Funny, so Good VT>> Check!

Just like to lend my support for Chris Cooper's statements above.  This is exactly the client base I serve in addition to working for a School District as my main job.

I am trying to figure out how to tell my bosses tomorrow about how great this product this is and then tell them oh by the way the cost has increased to $20,000 to get the same ability to have our teachers be able to edit their web pages.

VT>> It has not increased to $20,000 for existing customers so this is not a very accurate statement. All existing customers get very favorable upgrade terms. You get a free upgrade to Standard and you can upgrade your Standard 4.0 license to Pro at 50% off the list price. And that is ONLY in case you need to do that. Please share how many teachers you have, what they do with the site and how often they update the respective content and I will comment further.

Or rather only 10 of them can be editing at a time.

Thanks for that...

I actually thought this whole time Sitefinity would come out with modular pricing. Such as, add blogs, events, forms, etc to my Sitefinity, but I do not really need news or forums for this site for example. That way, you can cover the whole spectrum of needs vs pricing. It is going to be hard to please all without the modular approach, but I am hoping there is going to be some room for pricing tweaks before the release.

VT>> It's another idea we entertained but it did not get much support from anyone internally, nor from customers, nor from partners. It would have made the evaluation and selection process quite difficult  and cumbersome. Moreover, such an approach is not that easy to implement from a purely technical perspective. We also wanted people to focus on the whole package vs try to find out whether blogs costs $200 or $375.

I agree with the community that the pricing is completly off and yet beautifully "calculated" by Telerik in terms of not only the prices, but the features included. I´ve have been bragging to my clients and potentiall clients about the new fantastic SF4 for about a year now, and one feels a little bit cheated. Sure, all the good stuff that i´ve been bragging about is there but it´s going to cost 20 000$. It was clearly naiv of me, but I was expecting the top of the line version to like triple in price, up to 3000$ at most.

VT>> Everyone is commenting on the $20K price tag:) The big question is - is that what you really need or the big problem is that you are seeing a license that has 4 zeros instead of 3, regardless of what is in there? We did a lot of research and VERY few customers really need the Pro Unlimited Edition.

As to the $3,000 price tag - I am not sure you can find a CMS that does everything that SF does and does it in the same way or better and costs that much.

Small Business: I know I would have a hard time selling this. Btw customer, you have to keep track of you´re pages, content items, images and stuff. If you exceed? Well I would have to charge you 2000$ + and a small upgrade fee.

VT>> I tried to explain this in another comment - 50 dynamic pages + 1000 content items is NOT a small number. That's a corporate website with 40-45 static pages, news with 400-500 items and blogs with 400-500 items. I mean, if a business has that much activity and is pushing out that much content, then probably they can make the big jump and spend $1499 on the higher version. Come on guys, I can't buy the argument that a decently sized business can afford to spend $1500 on a MacBook but can't spend the same amount of money on its public facing website.

Standard: As many has said before me. No granular permissions and analytics?

VT>> Will not be the case. Making some changes there.

I think all the pages, items and CMS users limitations will be a huge mental block for most my customers. Pay 8000$ and still have a CMS user limitation? I thought such limitations was a thing of the 90´s and dodgy "but a site for a dollar" companies.

VT>> There are no limitations in pages or content items for Standard and up. As to the # of users - I said it many times - those numbers are higher than you think and they cover the needs of 95% of our customers. It was never our goal to push everyone to PE Unlimited. Our focus was to make sure the Standard Edition is priced right and with the proper features.

To end on a positive note. I think the whole community is really impressed by SF4 and a little proud to be a part of it. I know I am!

VT>> We are very excited too. Once the initial mist clears up, I think customers will see that the changes are not at all that drastic or scary and that you will get a much better bang for the buck. I do understand though that the initial reactions are very natural when the list prices change so much and you are not fully aware of what's coming up ahead, what's the right license for you, what are the ways to accommodate some of the borderline cases, what are the upgrade options, etc.

There's few things that bug me a lot, and I can see why they held out letting us know the details after the huge other thread.  But a lot of time and effort has been put into the resources letting us know the details and justifying the price points I highly doubt anything will change at all.  Especially because people can buy the upgrades now...

VT>> We did not talk about prices because we wanted to give you the complete picture - what the product offers, how the different editions look like and how much it costs. Even today, the bigger part of the discussion is around the price of the PE Unlimited and not so much around the value of the product.

1) Concurrent user scale: 1, 1, 5, 10, unlimited seems a little crazy.  What I cant find any info on is what they MEAN by concurrent (aside from the tooltip).  It seems to define it as logged in users with access to the backend, not as users IN the backend.  It should be more like 1, 3, 10, 25, unlimited or something, 1,1,5,10,unlimited is like DropBox level scaling.  So 1 person at the company edits a page, but since there's no workflow he yells over to the other guy to have a look at it.  Person 2 logs in, but oops he can't see it because the 1 user limit is in effect, he has to tell person 1 to log out.
  I've always been told inline page editing was going to be supported (so I can assign an admin edit rights but they cant get into the backend to break things)...is this now scrapped and that person counts to this 10 limit.  I don't understand why there even is a concurrent user limit...why does that matter.  The whole concurrent user thing sucks past small Business... :/

VT>> Yes, people doing inline editing count. But how many of your small business customers have more than say 2-3 concurrent users modifying site content at THE SAME time? Very few I guess. The concurrent limit is the single best way to judge the scale of the website. You have a small website (in terms of pages and editors) - you pay little. You have a huge site with many concurrent users who are logged in all the time (still waiting to see a real customer example in this thread) - you pay more. There's nothing radical here.

2) Content Item cap On top of a page cap...so what does this mean, there's a market for controls to delete old events, news, and blog posts?  Page cap should have been it and strip out analytics and localization.  A small business I assume would want to archive and have a system to manage files\etc...Who really cares about localization but a large business. I think Analytics was removed instead of Localization because it's way easier to just not include something entirely pluggable than remove a rather large piece of integrated functionality.  Lets say I make my own module based on News or Generic Content...will that count against the cap too?

VT>> Incorrect assumption about localization. Many small businesses in the Southern part of the US, in Canada, in parts of Europe do care.

3) Granular permissions...COME ON...this was promised from the get go.  I missed this part from the webinar so I'm super shocked if what's in this thread is true...so I can restrict granularity who can APPROVE a page, but not the controls that people can put on the pages or the areas in which they can modify?

IMO there's one too many pricing levels...kill premium and re-scale small business and standard and drop ultimate down a bit.  I think this is how it went...they wanted high-end to be $20,000 so they started there with unlimited so they then had to figure out what to strip out to justify the different pricing levels all the way down to free.  So by the time they got to Small Business they were running out of things to strip out so that's where the max items came from.  I don't want to field calls from a client trying to have TWO people log in at once, then later when they run out of Content to add.

VT>> Guys, if SBE is not good enough you can always use an alternative product. Some of you might remember that SBE is exactly what the community wanted several months ago. And it the parameters requested were along the same lines.

Proud to be part of something I can no longer offer to my clients? I have no pride in that, rather I look quite foolish and now have to scramble for an alternate solution (and ramp up my skill set) because the features I have been selling to my clients just became out of their price range, and by a long shot!

"Soooo disappointed! I'm seriously devastated as I had launched 5 sites using SF in the past year and not one of them would have happened if the price was $1,999 and they'd also be impossible with the 50 page limit at the $499 price point.

Sometimes I think people are so used to getting everything free (usually just perceived free) in regards to software that they don't understand that there is actual cost (if not money, then someones time) . Perhaps it would be worth telerik sharing some ideas on how to sell the product to our customer base inplace of lowering the price. The easiest thing to do is ask telerik to lower their price but that might not be the best option for all of us.

VT>> Glad that at least one person brought that up:) And we will prepare materials for you guys to show to prospects how Sitefinity is different and how it would add value to their business.

I am all for lower prices but when a small business balks at $2000 for a really nice content management system then maybe they don't really need 'this' one. Why 'should' they have a top-of-the-line product if they want to pay for it at a price of their choosing.

VT>> If people can't justify the purchase of a Standard Edition for $1,999 maybe then Sitefinity is just not right for them. You get TREMENDOUS value for that money and Sitefinity continues to be very competitively priced for what it offers. Once everyone gets to play with the RC bits, I am sure your opinions will gradually change and you'll see the tremendous possibilities it offers (any of the editions).

Anyways, just an opinion.

John, I don't think anyone wants anything for free, I know that I don't. However one of my biggest beefs is that today I can sell Sitefinity 3.7 to a client and tell them that they can have unlimited pages and editors for the great price of $899 (it really was a great price!), and they'd probably even pay a bit more. But tomorrow I now have to tell them the price for the same thing (because as far as they're concerned it's the same, they didn't ask for analytics, source code etc.) it's now gone up to $20,000. That's like a car salesman telling you, wait for the 2011 model of the Ford Focus, it's a great upgrade (but you've seen photos, it's nicer but it's still a focus so you expect a moderate price increase), and then when it's almost ready to ship they tell you that oh, btw, the price is now 20x higher and we put in a Ferrari engine that you didn't want or ask for anyway...

I hear ya, John.  We all know development takes a LOT of time and energy.  I appreciate that, I really do.  For that matter, I wish Telerik all the best.  They write great stuff.

I think the problem is that while most of us expected a price increase, the jump from $899 to $19,999 (for a featureset we have become accustom to) is completely unworkable.  The way I remember it, they were going to switch to one edition (dropping community...citing making a more managable codebase) then, after much feedback, they said it would come back.  I surely didn't expect that they would go from wanting to manage just one edition to adding four more!  Especially with the features we have been using (and planning for) to be in the $20k version!  Who, in one version, ups their price 22 times?  That's nothing short of insane.  Yes, I know they are throwing in the source code, too, at that price, but personally, I plan on leaving Sitefinity core development up to them.  That's a bonus that is meaning-less to me personally.  I admit that my disappointment is due to my expectations, but, up until now, Telerik has always exceeded them.

I currently have 5 Sitefinity sites under development, with about 15 more planned for the next 1-2 years.  I am now forced to either evaluate other products (which I admit, I hate to have to do), or plan on going with Standard and dealing with rolling my own analytics integration, working around the granular permissions limitations, and completely rewriting some of the site backend CMS parts for the front-end to get around the concurrent CMS user limitation.  Those options suck, because I picked Sitefinity so I could focus on my application and not spend time on the infrastructure.

Gabe basically said Telerik *had* to have an expensive product to fit into a category so they would be considered by large enterprises.  Good for them, but for $20,000, I would expect something like single server or developer license with unlimited domains.  I'm pretty sure that's how SharePoint works.  Telerik could have the price tag they need, and we would get something to work with.

VT>> :) You'd be amazed how much SharePoint would cost for an installation your size:) The $20K would not be enough just to get you started with the needed hardware.

Do whatever you have to do to be competetive, Telerik, but I hope this isn't really it.  I feel burned.  Were you paying attention to the ZenDesk pricing fiasco back in May?  It was ugly.  And their prices *only* went up 300%.  I go to bed tonight hoping this was only a bad dream...

VT>> My suggestion to everyone who needs PE Unlimited and is working for a school, non-profit, etc - get in touch with our sales team. We offer academic and non-profit discounts and we will take into account your situation. Maybe there's an intersection between your needs and what we can offer.

I hope that Telerik is watching this thread closely and how many of their small business customers it looks like they are going to lose because of the limitations and unheard of price increase.

VT>> We are. And we are considering some changes based on your input.  But I don't agree about the "unheard of" price increases:) For a small business, the increase is from $899 to $1,999 not to $19,999 as small business definitely don't need the latter. For some customers, it might be even beneficial as they could move from $899 to $499.

I am sure they expected some kind of fall out.

VT>> We did. And while we want to take into consideration all views, we can't appeal to everyone. If I did not firmly believe that what we are doing is right I wouldn't be answering these forum posts. I firmly believe that Telerik is being fair in the situation and that the pricing is by no means outrageous. It can be outrageous if you compare Sitefinity to Joomla or Wordpress but that's not an apples to apples comparison.

I hesitate to say it but it appears as if they no longer want to be in the small business market anymore and are looking to just stay with the big fish.

VT>> If this were the case, why would we care to have a SBE Edition or even a Standard Edition? Why bother having them and not just focus on the Enterprise accounts instead?

I am hoping that someone sees the shock and dissapointment and gives me a better explaination than "we are including the source code".

VT>> Today, it is the source code and the unlimited users. In a few months, it will be a bunch of other extra features.

I agree with a previous poster.  I never asked for the source code.  The ability to customize sure but not see everything.

I have developed 5 or 6 websites in the last year using a combination of the community edition and standard edition with several other clients lined up to buy the full version as soon as the site was up and had proved itself.  Now I have to recomend that they stay with SF3.7 and hope that I can find an alternative CMS that has a similar style and learning curve.

Page limitations?  Who builds a website with the plans to only have a maximum number of pages

VT>> Let's say a lot of people. Take a look at the different plans of any of the hosted CMS systems. All of them have similar limitations and it seems people do just fine. If you take a closer look, you will find that most of them are times less generous than we are. 

....you know what...I don't think  that these posts are going to do any good but I can hope.  I am also in the same boat as another poster;.  My feeling are based upon my expectations...but who could have expected this.  If I raised my prices 22 times what they are now I would be out of business tomorrow.

I hope I wake up tomorrow with this bad dream behind me too.

"Sometimes I think people are so used to getting everything free"

No, that's not it...we're just a little shocked is all.  We've been told it has X, Y, and Z for months so we've (well I've) been selling future projects on it based on those features and the assumptions that for probably a slightly higher price we'd get what we have now...now I know I've lost at least one because they need the premium (control permissioning and workflow) and they were only going to pay $3500 with the licensing cost coming out of that.

VT>> Permissions is coming in Standard. Please read my note about Advanced and Basic workflow in another comment.

It's still the best page builder\cms on the market, it's just going to be even harder to get those small to midrange projects since the small business license really wont cut it for most...it's the content item limit really, and every place has people who screw things up so no granular site-wide permissioning keeps us in the same boat we're in now.

VT>> Thanks for the thumbs up. While we will not be adding granular permissions to SBE (even today it is not site-wide, it's per page), I would still once again like to stress that 50 pages + 1000 content items is not that little and it can give any small website great mileage. You jsut have to understand what those numbers really mean. Btw, if no one thinks there's a benefit to having the SBE, easiest thing in the world would be to trim it. I mentioned this earlier - this SKU + the limitations were born out of the requests and suggestions of customers focused on that market, not at the fancy of our bus dev tean.

Was any of the dealers or the community consulted about pricing? Honestly a real question. Some may say it is none of my business.. but it IS my business!

My comment about the "getting things for free" was more of a general comment about the vast majority of internet users and not necessarily the people using this product. It is this perception that causes alot of financial attitudes to change not only in software development, but anything that can be digitized (music, movies, etc).

From some of this thread and alot of the previous discussions concerning the dropping of a community edition it seems there was a lot of concern about a small business having to pay for a solution as compared to starting with a 'starter' solution and purchasing something 'if' they find they need it and price increases in the order of $500-$1500. Perhaps, the reintroduction of the community edition bumped some of the pricing up so that now a portion of users that can persuade businesses to pay for what they use now must support the ones that feel they shouldn't have to. I know this doesn't speak to everyone, but it does speak to some.

'Personally', I think $2000 is a reasonable price to pay for this product and am very disappointed with the limitations placed on this level of product. If someone has a current license that allows an unlimited amount of pages, cms users, etc. I think it is very deceiving to be calling this an upgrade. I also don't think it out of line to ask for more features (workflow, analytics, source code)  based on the amount paid. But these are my opinions based on my own needs and maybe I am missing something. Perhaps telerik has good reason to have step-ups at these large orders of magnitude and I would welcome their help in promoting their product to my customers with actual reasoning and not a 'well look...you get analytics'

VT>> Ok, I guess some data would help - over 90% of existing customers have and need less than 3 concurrent users. We decided to add 2 more to that so that there is a buffer. True, it is a limitation we are adding to the new licensing but it will not affect the majority of the customers. For all others we are offering an upgrade path and we are ready to discuss your needs further.

I really want some reasons as to how to sell this product. I know it is at an RC level; however, the pricing has now been introduced and I have to decide if it is in my best interest to continue promoting it.

VT>> Our hopes are that you will get more business from customers, not less. Just as Apple got more business from a more expensive phone - it offered unique capabilities and a really enjoyable experience and people were not hesitant to pay more for that.

The upcoming Sitefinity release offers some really nice new features and some things that arguably should have been there all along now are (workflow in 3.7 is not ready for prime-time). I sold a client on Sitefinity 3.7 Standard mainly in anticipation of some of those 4.0 features. However, if I am interpreting this correctly, my client will be losing functionality by going to 4.0, namely being limited to 5 concurrent backend users.

VT>> If you look at it that way, customers are going to lose compared to SF 3.7. As I said many times before - 5 concurrent users is more than what the majority of the customers need and we don't think it should affect most of you.

During today’s webinar there was a slide illustrating that if you were to license all of the Telerik RAD Controls included in Sitefinity you would be out of pocket $3000, insinuating that right out of the box Sitefinity brings $3000 worth of value to your project - and perhaps it does, if you have use for all those controls in your project, if not then that value is unrealized. What this makes me wonder though, what was the purpose of that slide? Was it to blunt the impending price blugening about to be unleased, or was it to illustrate that as part of my Sitefinity purchase I am also paying for the RAD Controls? I have licensed the RAD Controls from Telerik for many years now, should I let that license expire when it comes due this next round?

VT>> The purpose of the slide was to show you how much we are improving the developer productivity and not to hint that the provision of the controls and SDK is the reason for the price increase. It's part of the added benefits.

If I was a cynical person I might think Telerik front-loaded the Sitefinity 4.0 licenses by selling people on 3.7. It's an easy sell, "buy now and you will get this great new version as part of your 12 month subscription coverage." It works out great for Telerik, as it gives them a captive user-base that is easily converted to their new licensing model. Only, and here comes the cynical part, what they don't say pre-sale is that the new model will actually be more restrictive and as I outlined above will offer my client less.

VT>> Pretty much everything we've ever promised for Sitefinity 4.0 is in the Standard edition (especially after the tweaks from today) - more customizable workflow, granular permissions, forms module, analytics. The only difference is the user cap and I won't comment on that one any more as that's one of the things we are not ready to change because it does not make sense for us and does not affect most customers.

I was really happy with Telerik as a company, but after today I feel like I’ve had the rug pulled out from underneath me.

Well, maybe Telerik wants to leave the small businesses and non-profit organizations behind and only focus on enterprises? To compete with SitePoint etc? I can understand that, but like said before: there was a really good CMS system to use for small businesses and NGO's for a good price.

Hi,

Quick note to everyone - we are paying attention and we'll reply to every single post. Hopefully we will have a good discussion that will result in good outcomes for everyone.

In order to make things more constructive I would appreciate it if you continue telling us more about your needs and where things are not working out for you in terms of features and limitations in the different editions, along with some ideas how it can be solved. Some of you already painted a great picture of their needs and how possibly we can address them.

We will consider everyone's feedback as long as it is not along the lines of "I want the Pro features in the SBE (or free) editions". It cannot happen because it does not make sense for us. At $899 per license Sitefinity is not really paying off for us. It's as simple as that.

While we cannot please everyone, regardless of what we do, we will do our best to cover your needs and to openly discuss why some decisions were taken. I do want to stress that ANY potential changes will be made because we believe in their validity and not because we panicked reacted to pressure. We've done the math, we knew there would be some "casualties" so that's not the thing that will make us change our minds. Real, well-thought out use cases, justification as to why we need to make a change and some thoughts on how it would affect us (often customers don't think about our side of the equation) will make us consider reshuffling some lincensing components.

Also, if the list prices are high - get in touch with our sales team and learn more about the Partner program and its benefits.

Vassil Terziev
Co-founder/CEO
Telerik

Hi all

Hi Matt,

Guys, I will start replying to all of your posts. Don't be surprised if you see my notes embedded within your original post. I think this would add a lot to the readability of the whole conversation.

Hey everyone,

Ok, I'm buying what Vassil's putting down...nice to hear the why and that there is a bit of flexability\movement happening. 

- No granular permissions in standard was a big stickler for me - Fixed
- Concurrent users are BACKEND only - Fixed (or at least okay)...although it would be nice if SBE had two...or the super admin didn't count as one.

Thanks Vassil, we'll probably go Ultimate here just to be safe anyway.


**Edit** For the private side though, if I'm to sell someone on the SBE....to give the users a 1000 item limit can you at have it so they can let news or events auto archive or delete old items? And PLEASE two concurrent backend users

I work for a school district as well and had referred two other district to Sitefinity who currently have purchased. I have been working with our organization and been in contact with Sitefinity for the past two years to convincing our people that Sitefinity was a great product and could really do a lot for us.  After 18 months of meetings with our IT and Communications departments we were finally able to move forward and purchase in October. 

We have 70 campuses that we were planning to use this for our district, intranet,  campuses and possibly create course ware portal inside of the framework.  We have over 4000 teachers and almost 69000 students. To effectively do this we would need load balancing and unlimited users logged into the back end, the Professional Unlimited edition.

I am all for Telerik jumping into the big leagues for CMS solutions, and to be honest the new pricing is still better than Sitecore, Ektron and some others we had looked at.  My problem is that this was totally unexpected and we have started to build out 2 sites using 4.0.  We purchased a license in early October with the sales contacts knowing exactly what we were planning to use the product for, and were assured we would get a free upgrade to Sitefinity 4.0.  The major reason we purchased this in October rather than waiting for the official release was that we were told that there would be a new pricing model coming with the new release, and by purchasing a license in advance we would not be effected. 

That is how I sold this to my supervisors and to the IT department and why we have started development.  Now I have to go to them and tell them that in order to do everything I told them it would do it will cost 10K to upgrade.  (And to be totally fair I don't think that is too much for a CMS and for what Sitefinity can do.)  That is a really large unexpected cost that was not budgeted for.  Being a public organization we operate on a fixed budget for departments, and we budgeted more than what the product currently cost because we expected an increase, but in no way did we budget the 10K needed to do what we were planning on doing.

If 4.0 scales the way some are saying, I may be able to get by with placing the different sites on different servers and not need the load balancing ability, but the limit of 10 concurrent users in the backed still does me no good so the Professional edition would still not work.

Again, I am not really upset at Telerik for the new pricing and I can see how it is fair, albeit a little skimpy in the concurrent user arena.  My issue is that it was well known what we were planning to do with it, and that we were planning on beginning development in 4.0, and no one let us know that the free upgrade we would receive would not be sufficient and that there would be a substantial cost to upgrade to the needed version.  I really feel like Telerik could have been more upfront with us about this.  I feel somewhat betrayed that after bragging and raving about Sitefinity is capable of to my organization and to other who I purchased, the story ends with a 10K surprise.  It makes me look bad to my organization and my peers.

I really hope we can work this out somehow, because with the way school finance is we may not be able to purchase the upgrade and be forced to look at other options.  I really liked Sitefinity and 4.0 looks awesome.  I would rather not go there.

Quick Q...Each subdomain gets it's own concurrent user count right?  Different site root, different DB?  Not that I'm trying to find workarounds, just I have about 3 internal subdomain sites on standard right now.

Would that not be the idea work around though? Just copy and paste your install to x number of subdomains, point them all to the same database and presto, you can have as many editors as you like. Your subdomains could be departmental or something so it even makes sense to the user (i.e. finance.myco.com creative.myco.com).

Well we have seperate DBs at the moment...but I dont think that would work...and if it violates the license it shouldn't be done anyway :)

The backend tells you who is logged in so I assume that's stored in the DB somewhere?

Hi,

Hi Vassil,

Mr. Terziev asked us and me specifically to point out our needs rather than just complain.

So here goes...

First I would like to say that I love Sitefinity and all the new features are pheonominal.  I home some of my earlier posts did not make it sound like I didn't appreciate the quality of the product.

As far as my scenario(s) go.

For my independent /consultant projects the $2000 price tag is not unreasonable and was actually expected.  It will be a difficult sale to get the ability to have unlimited pages but I will give it a shot.

As far as the rest of it goes.

I work for a school district.  I researched every possible CMS that was even close to being user friendly and give a lot of customizable control to the developers.  It was the greatest day in the world when a colleague mentioned Sitefinity and I sat through a sales demo of the product.  The price was unbelievable and the control that was allowed was just what were were looking for.

We based our entire district site on the Sitefinity product and made the purchase.  To give you a better picture  we have 30+ campuses and 1500+ teachers and another 1500+ departmental staff members in our district.

Sitefinity was perfect with unlimited subdomains we could host the site with one license and create a seperate subdomain for each campus/department.  We could even hook into AD for users and permissions.  We were looking for a little more granularity on image/document library permissions and on controls allowed to be used as well but we were dealing with those issues and looking forward to that ability in 4.0

We have paid our subscription and were delighted to be offered the free upgrade to 4.0.

Then the webinar yesterday happend. and all of a sudden we went from being able to have unlimited users editing to only being allow 5.  Even if we only had one editor per campus that would be 30 users that could be logged into the site at any given time making updates on their respective sub-domains.

That does not even scratch the surface of us wanting each teacher to have their own webpage(s) that they can log into and edit on there own to give parents and other stakeholders the most upto date information on their classes and what is going on in their schools.

So you can see 5 users i unreasonable in our scenario.  So lets look at the upgrade to pro.  Ok wow you have given us 5 more users...really and for that you have increased the cost to $8000 ($6000 for the upgrade according to the website)  and added functionality that we do not need and did not ask for.

So in order to accomidate our need of unlimited users we are forced to go to the professional unlimited version of the product which will cost us $20,000 ($18,000 according to the website to upgrade)

I guess the upgrade prices above are only in effect if we don't take advantage of the limited time offer of a 50% upgrade discount.

So with the discount we are still adding $10,000 to our annual budget.

Our school districts budget is set starting in August.  You gave no indecation of price increases  anywhere close to this ammount in any documentation other than to say we would get a free upgrade to 4.0 because we had already purchased a license so we did not budget for the increase in cost.  Nor will we be able to do so before the 50%discount offer expires in April of next year  So you really are adding an $18,000 price tag to your product for us.

School districts also have rules about how much we can spend on any given item before we are required to get a competitive bid from other vendors.  In which case we may be forced by law to switch to another CMS if we find a company that is willing to give us their product for a cheaper price.

I am aware that educational intitutions are probably not your primary focus however your product really is a great fit for them.  With this pricing structure and the restrictions you have basically alienated an entire part of your potential client base.

Perhaps if you offered an educational type license that gave us the added functionality we need without including the source code.  We don't need that.  We don't have a need or desire to develop the product from that perspective  that is why were were looking for a CMS in the first place.

Anyway I hope this has given you more information on our specific situation and incidently I know of at least 2 other school districts in our area that fall under the same category and situation.

I respect the fact that you are choosing to answer these questions yourself and I look forward to your comments as well as others.

Just like to add that I thought that this comment posted by one of your staff members on the blog page was particularyly insensitive...

"Upgrading to Sitefinity 4 is optional for everyone who is using Sitefinity 3.x. As an existing customer, you are getting Sitefinity 4 Standard Edition at no extra cost(if your subscription is active). We also offer a 50% discount to existing customers for upgrades to either of the Professional Editions. While we believe that these are fair offers and allow for a smooth transition to the new licensing model, we do realize that it may not work for everyone. We do try to please as many customers as we can, but we realize we cannot please all."

It sounds like a "sorry but tuff" response and to a customer that has alredy invested a lot of time and money into your product.

It also makes it seem like that upgrade is a one to one transistion but with the limitation on users and the lack of some features that are already available in Sitefinity 3.7 that is definatly not the case. 

It is kinda like having a big ripe tomato and then someone trading it to you for a cherry tomato and you saying "whats the big deal you still got a tomato".

Maybe a bad analogy but the best I could think of.

Again I am not opposed to the pricing stucture as a whole but rather the limitations of the product seem unreasonable.  The comment above makes it seem like this person doesn't care about keeping current customers if they are unwilling to pay.

I don't think anyone is really that upset with you raising your prices to be honest.  Hey the economy sucks and inflation happens on everything.  It is the increase combined with the restrictions that is really making people mad.

Mr. Terziev,

First of all, Thanks Vassil for your time and explanations of why you have created the product range you have, I certainly appreciate having direct access to the CEO of a company Teleriks size.

Hey matt,
  Pretty sure your scenario will be fine from what they're saying...it's only when someone goes into http://<site>/Sitefinity or page edit mode will that concurrent user count mean anything.  The only time there's be a problem is if the users were all creating forms engine forms.

First of all Vassil, hi, I'm Simon. I have been a long time user of Telerik products. Second, thank you. I think it speaks volumes not only about Telerik, but about you, that you have taken the time to personally respond to everyone.

I do have an additional question. If you or someone from Telerik could precisely define what is being considered "source code." in Sitefinity 4.0. In Sitefinity 3.7 the included controls are embedded resources and require access to the external templates to make modifications. Will making modifications to the included controls in Sitefinity 4.0 require access to the "source code," and therefore a $20K license?

Great Question Simon!

I dunno, I think it's pretty clear...I mean you wouldn't change the control itself...you would use inheritance to add or change functionality...and templates are there to allow us to change things.  However if you had the source I guess you could change it directly...not sure why that would be advisable though since an upgrade might hose you.

They're just embedding everything to make it easier for us to upgrade.  (A 3.x upgrade sucks something fierce right now). 

None of that requires source code access

That's what I figured too Steve, but the past day has brought many surprises... so it seems prudent to have everything well defined upfront.

Hi Steve.

Just to add my voice to everyone else’s - I think Telerik makes great products! They are a passionate, dedicated, and important company within the .Net community, and they are a good partner. They assist me in delivering top-notch solutions to my clients.

Like most, I was not surprised or upset by the Standard licensing price increase - that was pretty well telegraphed ahead of time and I think Sitefinity is worth it. I was surprised and rather disappointed about the licensing tiers, and as I looked closer, the seeming loss of core capabilities. I think a mismatch existed between the features and capacity allotted to the various new tiers. Additionally, since yesterday was the first I heard about moving to the new “licensing model” it threw a wrench into current and upcoming projects I have been working on. From this lack of upfront communication, Telerik missed an opportunity to ensure a “smooth” transition to what seems to be the future of Sitefinity - a product I would like to be associated with.

I do appreciate what an active community there is here, and I appreciate Telerik getting in front of this.

<biggrouphug></biggrouphug>

First off, thanks Vassil for the responses and trying to make accomodations in regards to the feature set

In regards to the concurrent user decrease in the Standard Edition (from current license)...is it possible to consider the addition of a standard html type page edit feature that does not count as a concurrent cms connection (that connects and disconnects as described but out of the box instead of some custom code). Your comments regarding connecting/disconnecting as a means to relieve this concern makes me believe this is not the type of user you are concerned with. I also believe that this type of user would relieve some of the problems people are concerned about in regards to the CMS.

By the way, this restriction is not a problem for me; however, I can see an issue if someone is told they have unlimited access as CMS users and then you come back and tell them there is a limit.

Hey Dr. Gabe, quick Q on the renewal costs...

Do you know them or where I can find them?  I see the "Upgrade page" but not renewal costs...you said $10000 to get ultimate and renewal is significantly less?

Regards,
Steve

Here is the renewal information for SF4

www.sitefinity.com/.../renewals-upgrades.aspx

Oh yeah, I missed the renewal, just saw the upgrade....

Ok, so $10k initially, then $4k yearly isn't terrible I guess, but $8k and $1500 sounds much more doable...

I'm torn because I'd love our admin functions to be re-made as sitefinity modules, but that will never happen with a 10 user limit.  So I can either pay the 10k or make (*sigh*) my own admin backend to handle the custom DB I/O.

Only few things to add at this point.
But just to clarify, here are two cases -- two 3.7 licenses we bought and are currently developing:
One is for a multi-national corporation with about 10 subdomains (separate installations), built for dozens of editors in different countries. Budget has been agreed upon months ago. This site will stay as 3.7. We can't introduce limits on concurrent users and require a budget increase.

The second client is a non-profit organization (multi-lingual) where physicians are contribuiting editors. This will stay as 3.7 as well for the exact same reasons.

Problem, of course, is the fact that we've promised to both the extra perks of SF 4.0.
It is easy to say that a client can live with a limited number of concurrent users. But go and explain to a client that he should live with ANY limits at all.
If anything, I'd remove all limitations and cut down on support. The same-day response on the forums is way too generous, and in most cases a waste (for you) -- because people (us included) get used to skipping the documentation and posting a question.

Enough said.

I feel strongly as well that there should be a tier of pricing that is lower because it only comes with forum support - at least through standard.  And as John S. said you need to provide a standard module (or build the functionality into the controls) to allow certain users to add/edit blogs/news/generic content etc. so they don't have to access the CMS back-end.  Based upon these new concurrent user limitations this seems like an absolute necessity, not something to be left to be built by the customer.

Hey Gabe,
  I think this is what he means....It's not really creating features to circumvent the PRICING per-say...but that a 10 user limit for $8000 license could potentially be a bit low ASSUMING that each new module we create to give users access to in the backend increases backend usage.

  So personally I'm going to push for us to upgrade to unlimited with the discounts while they exists so that doesn't become an issue, but I can totally see why it would be a concern...module developement in 4 is awesome, but if creating one adds more users to the backend it might not always be the way to go.

  I know it'll become an issue with the SBE with only one concurrent user.  Ideally I would want to give the customer the CMS to create their pages, and create other modules to manage publications and other things. 
  One site I have right now allows clients to upload listing sheets for a collection agency.  The collectors then log into the backend to see the items and mark them as complete.  So standard is way overkill for this site from a webSITE needs perspective (low page count, < 1000 items), but the inability to have more than one person doing generic admin tasks is defiantly going to be an issue (for me, in this one instance since they keep the site open in minimized browsers).  The way modules offload a ton of common work from me is a godsend...so I don't want to have to make a separate admin area to get at those tables and do everything the hard way again.

  It would be nice if the Concurrent count only blocked usage to the standard bits like page editing so I can feel free to develop modules for them (dads business...I do it for free...you guys know the drill :)  Even the scenario in which he calls me at work and says "how do I do X", I'll have to tell him to log out before I can go in to see, then he can't follow along.  2 concurrent in the SBE would go a long way to help with that...

Steve

Gabe,

To clarify my post, I didn't say telerik needs to provide an offline editor, it was just asked if it was a possiblity. In no way was I suggesting circumvention of pricing. The comments from Vassil led me to belive there was a different concurrent-type user that you were concerned with.

All and all I am quite happy with the pricing.

Regards,
John

Steve, I have the same scenario. Did you get an answer on this? I was told 'no', that the Concurrent User count is shared across sub domains.

If that is incorrect, and each subdomain can have it's own user count, that would be a great solution for my unique way of using Sitefinity for my customers. If you get an answer, Steve, please let me know.

Thank you

I would also like to know if the concurrent user limitation is reset with each subdomain.  If that is the case than it would solve almost every issue with our school district site as well.

And do we have to have a seperate installation in order to make that work or can that be accomplished with a single installation?

We would still have to figure out a way arround that limitation for our teacher pages but that could be done with creative solutions I guess.

What says Telerik?

Telerik has stated to me in an email from their sales team that the Concurrent users span across ALL sub domains.

I fail to see how they can monitor the total number of logged-in users on all separate installations using separate databases.
Just my 2 1/2 c.

Hi,

As Vassil indicated in his replies, we are actively listening to all the suggestions made here and are discussing the ones that we consider valid. One such suggestion was to make the Analytics module available in the Standard Edition. This is version 1 of the Sitefinity Analytics Module and for now we are making all reports available in your Google Analytics account part of the Sitefinity administration area for convenience and so that you can apply permissions on individual reports(something you cannot do in GA). In the next versions of the Analytics module we plan to extend these reports with system information from Sitefinity to provide advanced reports that tie content editor activities and changes in the system(new content, new pages, etc.) with marketing results.

So we decided to make the current version of the Analytics module available in the Standard Edition to allow small and mid-sized business to conveniently track the activities on their websites within Sitefinity. For all organizations which need more advanced metrics, we plan to include future enhancements in this module in the Professional Edition.

Martin Kirov
Telerik

Truman:  You can even hard code the age of items counted, such as 3 months worth of items cannot exceed 1,000. If a business does not grow before reaching 1,000 items, you pretty much cripple their site for good until they pay you money. NO SENSE OF OWNERSHIP!

Hi Sitefinity Team

Gabe I have to disagree with you.

You are forgetting about customers who are in a service based business who do place a large value on their website...like my karate school website.  But may still need the flexability to place large amounts of information such as events, tournaments, belt testings, special sales, not to mention, photo galleries of their students performing these various tasks and flyers and documents for my students, and may have only 1, 2 or 3 employees that work for them.  They may need all of these people to have access to edit the site at the same time for various reasons.

You have also not addressed the needs of a shopping cart that may have 1000's of items that can be very easily maintained by only 1 or 2 people.

I currently only have about 25 pages but because of the large amounts of information I provide my students I am well over the 1000 item mark on my items so I am being told to upgrade just to be able to add more pictures and events...really?

You are also assuming that because people may not have enough money left over after paying their rent, utilities and other expenses for the month that they have enough money to drop $2000 at any given time on a cms that they used to be able to get for only $900 or be forced to use a $500 product that now has added limitations on the number of items they can post and the amount of pages they can have on their site.

By your very words your new model forces people to upgrade.  Does this seem right to force people to upgrade even if they have no need to get the extra features just to "unlock the restrictions" that were not there before in 3.7.

You are also still forgetting that a business may be willing to invest $2000 in their website but cannot afford to pay the developer to build it out because they spent all their money on the product itself.

I am really trying to keep an open mind here but I was involved in posting to the threads about the commiunity edition being disolved and as I recall one of the reasons stated for getting rid of it was to make it easier to support a single paid version...now you have 4 paid versions.

As I have said remove features but do not restrict the use of what is already there.

I have no need for workflow on my karate school website but I have a huge need for multiple users.  I have no need for multiple languages.  But I have a huge need for not being restricted on the number of items I can place on my site.

I agree with another poster that I think you should have gone with a modular approach.  Launch a core site at a reasonable increase in price and then allow people to buy other modules to install based on their needs.  Then you really do put the power of building a site into the individual site and developers hands.  If they don't need something they don't have to buy it.

Quickbooks would be an example of what I am talking about.  They have a core program and then if you want payroll you buy an add on.  If you want a contractor module you buy that.  If you want point of sale knock yourself out. The modules vary in price and rightly so.  Bigger modules should cost more but again it is the choice of the individual consumer not the choice of a group of people that cannot even begin to think of everyones different needs and desires.  However, none of the core features of the software are comprimised or restricted in their use.

I probably sound very negative and I'll admit I am a bit bitter but only because of the amount of time and effort I have spent selling Sitefinity to clients and to the school district that I work for and also because of the man hours I have spent developing these sites as well as my personal site and now I feel like all of that time has been wasted.

We have been told to contact sales with our idividual issues but response has been extremely slow.  I'm sure I am not alone in this feeling that I am spinning my wheels right now and have no idea whether I can go forward or have to start from scratch.

Again I love Sitefinity but I am struggling here.

I have three suggestions that would improve this transition for me. I'm not asking for all three suggestions, but one of these three would probably solve my issues completely.

I think it's absolutely up to Telerik to set the prices. I don't know how many will walk up to Porsche and complain about the price tag.

Everyone who has ever worked with Telerik know that their support is simply the very best on and off the net. And this is why I think the price is correct for what you get.

I think the 500 USD price tag for SBE is a very fair price for such a great product. Yet I would have some stuff on my x-mas list as well. But as I tell my kids all the time - you can wish whatever you want but you wont get everything.

So Vassil (St. Clause) here is my whishlist

SBE
- 75 Page or even 100 (or option to buy more: for exammple 2 SBE licenses for 100 Pages)
- localization included 
  -> Small Business in US no problem. 
  -> Switzerland for example no go for SB in region with 2 languages Extra 1500 USD not possible
- Standard Google Analyics integration
- 2 concurrent users
- 50 % discount for small businesses

------------------
Where I think Telerik thinks wrong

Only big companies need localization because they opparte world wide and can afford more expensive solution
 - no small business my need two or more langues
 - yes big companies can afford more expensive solution. small business not

Discount not available for small business
- Small businesses would be exactly the once that need the discount on second licenses. To a big company whats 20k für a superb CMS system. Nothing. They spend more time for addvertisment in a day.
- To small businesses an extra 500 USD could mean a lot

Support
- As mentioned before. Teleriks support is simply outstanding and from my point of view takes some money on workforce to provide such high leve. So if you would force yourselfs out of the community support you save time

Big vs. Small
- SF 3.7 is simply the CMS with the best usability (haven not played with 4.0 to much) So if santa will deliver a SBE with the features on my whishlist I am sure the spread of SF will take of and Telerik will be the Nr. 1 brand for CMS systems. which will lead to bigger business (I would rather sell 5 SBE with 25 incidents, then 1 SE with unlimited incidents). If you make SBE foolproof you wont have to anser 5 questions a year.

Bottom line

I think most of us are afraid that we have to leave Sitefinity and Telerik because of the price is to heigh for our customers. And small Web Publishing firms can not afford to have to use 2 content management systems - one for customers without the money and one for those who can afford a solution.

I am sure that Telerik will suprise us again and again and hope that I can stay with Sitefinty.

Thanks for listening to your customers. It's not taken for granted by me.

Markus

PS: @Gabe

I think the dust is settling on last week, I think the healthy exchange between both Telerik and us in the community will lead to 4.0 being the success it should be for all concerned, my thoughts here:

http://blog.matthewcooper.info/2010/11/sitefinity-evolution-of-cms.html

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the RC now! Meanwhile back to 3.7 for maybe the last time :)

M

Just had a comment on my blog from Steve who is under the impression that front end users authenticated in Sitefinity DO count towards the concurrent user limit......

Over here is where I'm getting confused

"we restricting the concurrent users by a role. In other words, we are counting the concurrent users in the Backend role"

So that kind of reads like "If user X has Y role, then they are unable to log in"

It seems like one has to seperate CMS users from web site users. If this true every one that has rights to the backend must have two log ins or there will be frequent concurrent user issues.

I was thinking of making a "CMSEditor" user and just have them use that, but then I lose the ability to know who changed\broke things...

Hey guys,
I will try to explain this with other words:
The concurrent users limitation affects only the users that are logged into the administrative backend of Sitefinity and are performing tasks in yoursite.com/sitefinity .

To rephrase and explain the quote from the previous post, here is how it works:

All registered users of your Sitefinity website have their profiles in the system.
Some of them are just visitors, who belong to the "everyone" role.
Some of them are also members of a role that has access to restricted pages on the frontend of your website.
Some of them (the administrators, content editors, publishers etc.) will also belong to a role  called "Backend role". By belonging to this role, they have access to the administrative backend of Sitefinity, where they can perform administrative tasks like creating pages, news items, events, forms and so on. There can be unlimited number of members of that role, however with Sitefinity 4.0 Standard, only 5 members of that role can be logged in simultaneously in your administrative backend.

Whew, okay, sorry for panicking over nothing :)

(still think for $8000 Premium should be upped a bit from 10, and SBE should be 2)

I agree that on all versions there needs to be a minimum of 2 users, even if one user is just a super/site admin that's not even allowed to create content. If we are forced to have only one content editor account shared with a number of people, or they each have their own, it's inevitable that people won't log out correctly and then the next person has to sit there and wait for it to time out. The user should be able to contact an admin to ask them to kick that user so that they can log in. I'm sure Telerik will say just restart the website but to me that's not an option for every time someone forgets to logout.

I don't think COMMUNITY needs to have 2 editors since it's really for a personal\blog site...and the odds that you and someone else would be editing at the same time, if there even is more than 2-3 users in the system is low or zero...but creating modules for an SBE means the chances of multiple people in the backend consuming that info increases.

Phil:  If we are forced to have only one content editor account shared with a number of people, or they each have their own, it's inevitable that people won't log out correctly and then the next person has to sit there and wait for it to time out.

Grisha,

What you say contradicts what I was told elsewhere:

Just a small clarification, we restricting the concurrent users by a role. In other words, we are counting the concurrent users in the Backend role. These are only users that can have permission to access the administration.

http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/forums/sitefinity-4-x/general-discussions/clarification-on-quot-concurrent-cms-users-quot.aspx#1417735

I just want to make sure I understand this correctly...

An example:

Standard Edition

I have a user Frank that is assigned 3 roles; Backed Page Editing, Backend User Administration, and Lunch Menu Page (which is a secured website page).

Currently there are 5 people logged in and changing page content in the Backend CMS area

Frank logs in to see whats for lunch today and does NOT go to the Backed Page Editing or User Administration (although there are links for him to go to those pages if he suddenly desires to). 

Is he allowed to go to this lunch page or will he get a message there are too many current CMS users?

Thanks,
John

I agree with Steve

CE only 1 needed
SBE should have 2 (otherwise it would be a VSBE = Very Small Business Edition :-)

Feel a bit like Telerik is taking a beating. Maybe we shold cut them some slack. They will come up with the best solution and have shown to be flexible in the past.

markus

I think the idea that only '5 people' can use this software for 10 concurrently is probably unsettling since we are not used to this level of pricing. That is 900 a seat. Even high end ERP software, would not see much above 100 per seat.

@Jason

I agree to some part, but why would you think to have a right to that:

Quote
Allow ANYONE that owns a license to any site with a subscription to have access to upgrade to the 20,000 Enterprise version for free.
Unquote

You get a free version of standard editions (which is kind of what we had before) but you are correct it's a step back if you talk about the concurrent users. To me lots of the stuff to limit smaller versions has somewhat a clinicle and artificial feel to it.

Markus

Your comments surrounding load-balancing indicate you do not understand your customers or are completely out-of-touch with common hosting architectures used by SME's today, or both.  Your assumptions about what people spend on hosting are WAY off and your implication that only cash-rich companies have web demand dynamics greater than 1 server are patently ridiculous.  The purpose of load-balancing is to provide consistency of web response!!!  Anyone that knows anything about hosting would not cast that aside and say only larger companies must have cash and therefore should pay $$$ for reasonable performance.

If a company has considerable cash lying around as you imply, they will have a full site dev team that will resist the constraints of your product anyway.  Your product IS for the companies that need the function, but are spending more in line with 3.7 pricing.  I could have swallowed a 100% price increase, but 800% for "standard?!!!"  That is just irresponsible.  It is a shame as I do value Telerik's product, but a shift of that magnitude is simply arrogant and a complete disservice.  Do I want you to improve the product?  Sure.  Will I pay more for higher value?  Sure.  However, v4 suggests that I should use (and pay for) a nuclear reactor to heat my coffee!!!

Also, many of your responses cast your customers as some kind of unreasonable, greedy free-loafers.  I personally resent that and believe it highlights the obscure mentality of the current management which actually creates a far greater concern with .Net/AJAX/RadControls that we chose, perhaps unwisely, for our core app.  Why would I assume that you would not take a similarly ridiculous approach with that licensing model next go-round?  As another post stated, "this is more than a bad taste in our mouth."

I hate to do it, but it is time to shop for a new controls vendor as well.  Supplanting the controls will be costly, but I cannot risk the unpredictability and unreasonableness of the current Telerik management shown here.

We've decided to count to 10 and move on, continuing to work with Sitefinity.
But perhaps it's important to explain that the source of all the rage is expressed perfectly by Jason above (text in bold).
This is true especially for some of us who have "donated" to Sitefinity code and resources that today make up part of the product.
Consulting with a marriage consultant (your business partners) should not substitute and should better be accompanied by talking to your wife and kids.

hi Grisha, Georgi and Ivan

Hi mattc,

I've updated the thread, since there were some things to add here.

Any user belonging to the Backend Users role or to the Administrators role who authenticates within a Sitefinity 4.0 website is counted towards the concurrent user limitation. It doesn’t matter whether this backend or admin user authenticates by logging into the public facing website, backend administration area, or a third-party application using our RESTful Web Service APIs. That user is removed from the concurrent users count when he personally logs off, he is forcefully logged off by an administrator, or his session expires. The session expiration time can be controlled from the configuration settings of Sitefinity.

I think small businesses feel pushed out. This also kills the flow of the community which consists of small businesses, hobbists, self-employers, industry gurus, etc. No employees from enterprises are going to hang out in the forums, build plugins, write blogs, etc for Sitefinity. Why do you think most of the complaints are negative? Because you are pushing the very same community that invested to where it is today. It is very obvious that you want to focus on enterprises and think a price tag will do that. That's fine if that's what you want, but don't think that enterprises are going to contribute back.

@Truman Well said!! I too wouldn't want the source code even if they gave it to me. This is really an option that makes no sense to me at all. If Source Code is required by the odd Enterprise client it should be a "call for source code licensing options". It shouldn't be something that the rest of us have to pay for by this out of whack pricing model.

Hi there,

Can anyone help us understand why the Release Candidate release has been pushed back again? As recommended in last week's webinar we are planning a "real world" project with 4.0 and the postponements of the release date are causing significant concern on our team.

Any information would be much appreciated.

Alison

I just want to make sure I understand this correctly.

Hi mattc,

I've updated the thread, since there were some things to add here.

Any user belonging to the Backend Users role or to the Administrators role who authenticates within a Sitefinity 4.0 website is counted towards the concurrent user limitation. It doesn’t matter whether this backend or admin user authenticates by logging into the public facing website, backend administration area, or a third-party application using our RESTful Web Service APIs. That user is removed from the concurrent users count when he personally logs off, he is forcefully logged off by an administrator, or his session expires. The session expiration time can be controlled from the configuration settings of Sitefinity.

@Gabe If the source code doesn't inflate the price of the Premium Edition, what you're saying is you're giving away the source code for free? That's a great deal!

mattc, perfect and simple explanation about the concurrent users. Now I get it.

@Gabe

I have been long standing behind Telerik and accepted every decision they made so far, but sentences like this

Quote
This sentence perfectly explains why we have no desire to cater to this audience.  
UnQuote

just makes me feel like, let's say it mildly: unwelcome. The Garage Developer. I hope this is just some bad phrasing in the heat of all the bashing you are taking at the moment,  and not the way Telerik thinks - because this would contradict everything I got to know about Telerik.

I finally am not sure anymore about the concurrent users :-)

Quote

Any user belonging to the Backend Users role or to the Administrators role who authenticates within a Sitefinity 4.0 website is counted towards the concurrent user limitation. It doesnt matter whether this backend or admin user authenticates by logging into the public facing website, backend administration area, or a third-party application using our RESTful Web Service APIs. That user is removed from the concurrent users count when he personally logs off, he is forcefully logged off by an administrator, or his session expires. The session expiration time can be controlled from the configuration settings of Sitefinity.

Georgi

Clarifying the definition of concurrent users doesn't help me at all. I have understood it perfectly and I'm still in a bind. I will have many page editors, contributors and admins.

Here, Here, Jaime!

I second this sentiment. 

Knowing that we are in the same boat.  We were never asked about how we use the product either.  And it was well known to the sales team when we purchased our licence that we would need unlimited users for admin purposes as well.

Phil:  The issue with this is that up until you made the announcement of SF4 pricing, you DID cater to this audience. After waiting for over a year for SF4 to find out that over night you're no longer catering to the Small Business market is a real kick to the groin.

Of course the source code should inflate the price. If it doesn't, this is one of the most expensive CMS out there. Wow man, by far this is more expensive than just about any unlimited e-Commerce shopping cart too. $20K really?

Hi Andrei,

Hey Gabe,

@Gabe

Thanks for trying to softening the blow a bit. But still left some bruises.

My fear has always been that you would stear away from the small clients. And it seams to somewhat come true. However. I would not mind if you limit SBE Support to community only. The reason you have lot's of cost is not the download bandwith for SBE, nor the key generation - it's your outstanding support.  So cut back on the SBE support and you have a fire and forget product that will just be a nice cash cow.

a) you would have less to do with our not so advanced programmers -> save money on the support
b) you could add some featurs (see my x-mas list above) and make SF 4 SBE foolproof
c) You could sell lot's of SBE
d) A community would grow for SBE without your top people answering our post
e) SF 4 SBE could simply be the standard CMS for small business -> yes I think you have the potential

I don't  like customers who want more for less. But I have customers who expect at least the same for more :-)

There is a saying. Be nice on your way up you never know who your meet on your way down.

I kind of understand the votes for not beeing asked. Some of us have provided lot's of ideas on sitefinity.uservoice.com . Probably because beeing busy those ideas where not answered. The betas were so feature incomplete that I think we only understand what's happening when we have the RC in hand or on harddisk.

@all

So why not wait for the RC. Set up a demo project and try the concurrent user feature for ourselfes.

Markus
Over and out.

I don't think that many people are as upset about the price as they are about the restrictions.

Not only did you increase the price...that is to be expected with any product....but you then restricted the products use compared to what we had before. 

So not only are we paying more but we are recieving less!

Can you really not see what we are talking about?

@Gabe As Bryan said, you're dealing with a lot of heat here. It made me realize that I should also clarify that none of this is personal, you yourself have been a great evangelist for Telerik long before you were employed by them. The product, especially SF4 is truly amazing and is worth every penny. My frustration just comes from the fact that I have put so many man hours into SF customization and skills and I can't change my target market over night like you can. If I did, I'd be out of business.

When the final release is hear how will the login required for contentEditable elements within the browser affect concurrent logins.

When we chose Sitefinity over a year ago, a big factor for us was the unlimited concurrent users.  I'm the webmaster for my county and our government has over 40 departments each with multiple web contributors.

As someone who works with developers on a daily basis I completely the understand the need to charge a fair price for your applications.  Sitefinity is amazing and deserves a new pricing structure.  However, my problem is the seemingly arbitrary 5 concurrent user limit with the Standard Edition.

Can you possibly consider raising this to 10?  The Standard Edition would then be very appealing for us.

We can likely get by with 10 concurrent users, but it's hard to swallow at the $7,999 price tag.  I understand that all products increase in price as they mature, but to go from $899 to $7,999 for less concurrent users seems a bit unrealistic.

I understand that Analytics and perhaps a few other features will be added to various editions- is there anyway that the concurrent users will change, or are they completely cemented?

Thanks!
Brad

So I just got off the phone with Sales.

Nice guy...he sounded tired... and I think we both saw each others points.  I doubt it is going to change anything for us which still leaves our situation up to the boys and girls that hold the purse strings at our school district so we will see.

I did get one piece of information though.  Apparently there was a survey sent out to license holders asking about such things as number of editors and how many would be logged in at any given time and basically asking how the product was used.

I never received any such survey and I was wondering how many of you got one.

Could you chime in and just say "got the survey" or "no survey here"...I am just curious.

And for Telerik.  I am not trying to be a jerk here.  I am genuinely curious how many people got this survey and I would love to have Telerik publish the results of the survey as well.

I didn't get any survey (not that I can recall). I do remember being told that SF4 Beta would be out in October 09, so maybe the survey was sent out in summer 09? Maybe I filled something out then and just can't remember....

@bleutiger - I didn't get the survey unless it was combined in with their newsletters.

I believe there was a survey in August 09, sure someone at Telerik will confirm..

M

I never reveived any survey request.  I typically participate in such exercises and would have noticed if it was reasonably marked.

@mattc  Thanks for chiming in. It seems at least one person remembers it.

I have been getting newsletters and auto emails Since November of 08 but did not get a survey other than the one that told me to update my profile and gave me 1000 telerik points.  Thanks for that Telerik!

I am not saying it wasn't sent just that I did not recieve it. I normally participate in surveys too on products I use a lot and love.

Anyone from Telerik want to chime in.  Now I am really curious.

Regarding concurrency and the survey... I don't recall being part of the survey, but I would like to see how that was worded.

@Stormy:  And the jump for 10 concurrent to unlimited with no in-between?

Yes, this would not have occurred to me - "Concurrent CMS Users" - to me, that means logged into the Admin side of the site.

However, if this is going to apply to users logged in via the public side (presumably only for specific Admin type roles) then there really needs to be another option for managing this, and adding user counts to any version.

Something more akin the the MS Server-App approach of CAL packages, so you can increase the concurrent "CMS" user count for a site, in say 5 or 10 user packs, by applying a key.

Features and Modules should separate the versions, not basics such as user-access and security.

@Gabe...

The whole conversation here in the movies

www.youtube.com/watch

Markus

Hello,

where can I download and test the 4.0 RC?

kind regards
Frank

Hi

Gabe,

I would strongly urge you to seek infrastructure consulting somewhere outside Telerik to get an accurate perspective on load balancing.  It is NOT a sophisticated strategy by any means, it is a REQUIREMENT of any business wishing to provide consistent web response.  Until someone steps up and characterizes this properly, I feel compelled to continue trying to get you to adjust your thinking. . 

Level of visitation is NOT tied to the number of content providers you have.  We have 1 content provider, do not have millions of visitors constantly, but do experience surges that drive beyond the most powerful single server.  Simple and cost effective load balancing has been available since 2003 on MS Server 2003.  This is not new.

Hey Gabe,
"we decided to tie each edition of Sitefinity to real-world usage.  There can be an unlimited # of backend users, but each edition of Sitefinity is only built to engage with a % of them simulteously.  As a result, each edition of Sitefinity is tied very closely to how the CMS actually gets used"

This is the problem...it's not simultaneous concurrent people editing, it's a % of them logged in anywhere to the site; that's the fundamental stumbling block for most of us in the concurrent user scenario.

We want to give a bunch of people page editing access, but the fact that they wont be able to LOG IN to the site at all assuming 5 other people are logged in is crazy (obviously assuming standard).  Backend sure, that makes sense...user clicks Edit this Page on the site, tells them nope, too many other people are editing please try again...that's fine and probably expected behavior. 

PLEASE consider making it only check when users enter \sitefinity or inline page editing...

I think the pricing scale is fine, we all knew it was going up...and the discounts have helped our transition here.  FYI the educational discount does stack on the 50% off (so 60% total) right now if that helps anyone else.

Steve

Since I have the attention of every Sitefinity developer on the planet (and because I started this thread so feel I can change it's direction whenever I feel like it), I just wanted to let everyone know that we are currently looking for a full time developer who really knows Sitefinity (and all the other yada yada: ASP.net 4.0, C#, SQL Server 2008, plus if you have some design skills, we'll like you even more). Currently we are looking for someone local (e.g. Burlington, Ontario, Canada and surrounding areas, yes, even you Toronto). The nice thing about this job is that you can just simply play in the beautiful world that Telerik has concocted for us without having to worry about Sitefinity price increases or how granular the granularity is.

Any one interested such utopian bliss can reach us by heading over to our website @ www.cubiclefugitive.com (any one responding to this thread with an "I'm interested in the position..." repsonse instead of emailing us will be ignored and/or ridiculed.

Thank you for time. Now back to your regularly scheduled concurrent user/pricing debate.

Gabe: "So...we decided to tie each edition of Sitefinity to real-world usage.  There can be an unlimited # of backend users, but each edition of Sitefinity is only built to engage with a % of them simulteously.  As a result, each edition of Sitefinity is tied very closely to how the CMS actually gets used in the organization.  A web site with lots of people simultaneously editing content is a demanding web site and an important organizational resource."

We are an academic department at a university. Our web site does not generate any income. The pricing for 4.0 is a very unwelcome surprise and may require us to abandon the product. Given the hundreds of hours we've spent implementing Sitefinity this would be a disaster.

@Gabe or Telerik

So I have been asked to throw this question into the mix.

We have been discussing a strategy for our teachers to leverage blogging using Microsoft LiveWriter.  If our teacher are accessing their blogs using the WebLogAPI (hope I spelled that right) will they count against the concurrent user limitations in Standard and Pro?

@Richard: "Compare that to Microsoft, who sells us a copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 for $85 (vs. about $700 on the open market)."

Not wishing to labour my earlier point (although of course, now I will) but MS server O/S and apps are a prime example of what I was referring to.

You buy Windows Server, SBS, and back-office apps, of various versions, that are distinguished by their feature-sets.

They each come with a minimal number of CALs, and you buy then add-ons for those, to ultilise the feature-set  you required for your specific workload demands.

This allows MS to reduce the entry price of each version's feature-set, while deriving more revenue from those who make more use of each feature-set.

I feel that users should be able to buy the version of Sitefinity which offers the feature-set which matches their application requirements (with an appropriate price gap) and then be allowed to tailor the use of that feature-set by purchasing usage add-on keys to match their intended use of that selected version.

The 3 elements that Telerik seem to be focusing on controlling use of are:

1. Concurrent CMS Users
2. Site-Map Pages
3. Concurrent content items

Placing a low initial User, Page and Item  limit on ALL versions could perhaps allow Telerik to reduce the entry price to each version, and then customers could purchase useage licenses to match their needs... allowing those who need a feature of, say, the "Professional" version, but only have few admins, to justify the investment and match their budget. Similarly, it may be possible to even dial down the price of SBE even further to allow very small business or low-use sites to be justified, and expanded as required.

@Gabe

Did you miss my question reggarding the LiveWriter users?  Do we have an answer to that question.  We are trying to work within the constraints but we need answers to these questions to do that.

@Gabe

QUOTE
People and lost productivity cost a lot more than software.
UNQUOTE

Again this is true for big companies but not for a lot of owner run small business. They work evenings and weekends to do acounting and other stuff. So less work cecause of more productivity gives them more time off, but not more in the bank account.

Again for huge comparation a 20k license is absolutely nothing - to a small business 2k could mean the whole budget for advertisment for a year. Or one week less vacation with the family!

Working for a big company like Telerik might make it a bit hard to understand the little guys :-)

--------------

I have great confidence that Telerik will once again provide us with solutions (not only technicaly speaking) that we can use to prived our small customers with the best CMS. (Maybe buy a 4.0 license get a 3.7 solution, heck 3.7 is very good!)

Markus

Gabe, there's been a bunch of posts on using up concurrent in the front-end but nobody actually ends up responding to it.  I'm HOPING that this means it's at least being talked about?

Anyway, FYI for anyone looking at Ultimate with educational discount, it runs around $7,999...so not bad right now...might want to get all over that since the pricing scale wont be changing.

@Steve

Do you have that price confirmed by Sales or is that an assumption based on Gabes comment above about the 50% +academic discount?

I have asked whether both discounts apply and have not gotten a difinitive answer from anyone.

I would prefer an answer from Telerik but I will take a confirmed answer from another license holder if need be.

@ bleutiger

Active quote from sales...along with another new standard license, but I don't think that factored into the seemingly low price.

**Edit** so yes 60% discount, they do stack

Gabe says:

Hi,

I have read through nearly all of these posts and searched the forum.  I would just like one direct answer to clear up a question.  Regarding the concurrent users:  I understand this means those with back-end or administrative control.  Just to be clear - this should not affect those that are logged into the site to see restricted content (as in an extranet setting).  This is my one main concern of functionality.

Thanks

Sean, yes as of right now that's exactly what it *should be*...

If a user logs in anywhere on your front end with no intention of viewing anything in the backend or changing a page, and they exist in the Backend Users Role...you use up one of those concurrent users.

If a user logs in anywhere on your front end with no intention of viewing anything in the backend or changing a page, and they exist in the Backend Users Role...you use up one of those concurrent users.

Thanks for the quick reply Steve.  Much appreciated.

I figured I would throw my two cents in the discussion as from my point of view it seems this software is right on target as far as price.  I am a former Joomla user moving to a Microsoft shop now hence how I got into looking at .NET CMS's.  The two big choices it seemed were Umbraco and Sitefinity.

While the pricing changes are pretty significant - it quickly appeared how reasonable they were once a little research was done.  Umbraco for one ends up costing over 5k if you want full company support.  Plus 2k renewal fee per year.  Arguably you could say that support isn't necessary which bumps you down to $850, but full support from a company as reputable as Telerik is pretty huge.  Not to mention the community is thriving (where else do you get replies to posts within a few minutes on the forums).  I know you sure don't on the open source boards.

That and based on what has been shown to us about this 4.0 model - everything here is more polished.  It just seems easier to use for the clients that will be using the site.  Not to mention easier for the designers and developers.

I can understand how many organizations will not be able to deal with 5 concurrent back-end users, but I think this is mainly because they are the only ones speaking up (sort of how people 75% of the time complain about companies online because that's the only time you are willing to go to the trouble to write something).  I think Telerik is being honest with their assessment of how many users are needed by most organizations.  Hell, even with +50 employees there will only need to be 2 or 3 on at any given moment assuming the company has a webmaster and marketing staff.

All in all, it still seems well worth a 2k investment (model I am currently looking at).

@ Gabe

Thanks for the reply...not trying to be pushy for answers but this is really causing us some chaos at the moment.  We have had to step back and reevaluate and we need all the information we can get.

Incidently the piece I was talking about is called the "MetaWeblog API" if that helps clarify things.

Hi bleutiger,

Sitefinity 4.0 supports AtomPub protocol for LiveWriter instead of MetaWeblog which was the supported protocol in SF 3.x.

Yes the concurrent connections count in that case also, but those connections last very shortly, usually less than a second.  AtomPub supports basic authentication only. That means the credentials are sent with every request in the HTTP headers. No session is maintained, which means that each request is authenticated at the beginning and then the occupied slot is released at the end of the request. Even with a single available slot it will take quite a lot of users to encounter conflicts. How many users? It really depends on how active they are and how often they publish.

Kind regards,
Bob
the Telerik team

Hi everyone,

@Bob (regarding concurrent users usage via AtomPub):

I see your point that the occupied slot  in the concurrent connections count lasts a very short time since no session is maintained for AtomPub requests.

My concern is for the scenario in which 5 (or whatever) concurrent CMS users are logged in to the administrative end, and then a user attempts to publish a blog post via AtomPub. In this case, this user will see a high-level error message from LiveWriter such as "An unexpected error occurred" or (perhaps even worse) report an actual 401 "unauthorized" message (or whatever http response code you return).

This goes against the "it should just work" principal that is important for the non-technical community of users, and the IT staff that support them.

Can you validate that my assumption about this experience from an AtomPub client is valid, and if so, would you consider changing your approach so that AtomPub requests do NOT count towards the concurrent connections count?

Thanks,
Gary

Hi Gary,

In the current implementation of Sitefinity RC

- if you have 5 backend users that have been logged in and they are actively use the backend it would not be possible to create a new blog post through live writer, because you have to authenticate another user  - the 6th user which is not allowed by our licensing policy.

- if you have 4 logged in users there would not be a problem to authenticate a user through live writer - the 5th user.  As Bob said the authentication connections last very shortly and the slot is immediately released for another user that can post using completely different credentials.

LiveWriter is just a feature that we support and allow users to create content objects through it.

Kind regards,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Gary,

I think you have a valid point and we should consider it. I will bring up the subject on the next licensing meeting.

All the best,
Bob
the Telerik team

So let me get this straight regarding the concurrent users. I have an Intranet built on SF 3.7 that uses Active Directory authentication so users never log in or out. The majority of our users are in some kind of A/D role that gives them access to the administrative section. So the way I am understanding this, in order for our intranet to work in 4.0, we would need to go from the $899 original standard edition license, to the $20,000 enterprise license in order for our intranet to continue to function if more than 5 people (with some kind of administrative access) are on it at once? If my interpretation is correct, it would cost someone 2124.7% more to do the same thing in 4.0 as we did in 3.7? I realize there is a 50% discount so the actual cost would be closer to 10K, but the principal is the same.

Look, we all know that Sitefinity has long been a steal price-wise. The 2K standard edition is digestible and probably accurate, assuming that you don't LOSE functionality over 3.7.

The way I see it, the way to keep everyone happy both here and in meetings with the board of directors, is to keep the pricing for the standard, professional, and enterprise editions the same, but drop the concurrent users restriction on the professional edition. Or maybe even add granular permissions to the standard edition.

Has anyone an Standard Edition up and running and tried to open a user twice (on front-end on back-end) to solve the concurrent user situations.

And did you try to enter twice the same e-mail address?

If the same e-mail address is not working the concurrent stuff realy kills the product. Because havint to open all users twice may be dooable. But having two email adresses for each sure wont be possible.

Anyone can try this.

Markus

PS: I still don't get my stuff running with my share hosting provider thats why I ask you guys.

I totally agree with concurrent users being the biggest hindrance with everyday use. I can also imagine how many 3rd party integrations will be a problem... things will just work randomly. You just cannot rely on Sitefinity communicating with other apps anymore.

Hi There,

I'm looking at the pricing/feature set from an enterprise perspective, and for me it is not bad. I do only have the following comments:

1.    For Professional, I'm happy to pay the money, but the llimit on concurant CMS users is a problem. I would like to see that as unlimited, to pay an extra $12000 for that does not making sense, specialy when we would not require the source code.
2.    Also, in my view load balancing support should be a given, seeing that this is build on asp.net technology which has this as an inherent feature.

Other than this we are already planning our upgrade path with the RC and converting our existing custom modules.

Regards,
Jean Erasmus 

Final decision on Concurrent Users listed here

It is a great suggestion to count concurrent users only when they are actually making edits or browsing the backend of the system. There is no question that it is possible to be done. There is nothing impossible when it comes to computer science. However, there is usually a trade off cost involved for everything. If we count the concurrent users as @Kevin suggested, this will have a great impact on the performance of Sitefinity. Not just the back end, but also the public facing part of the website. We would need to make a lot of checks on user's behavior. It is a question whether to make all Sitefinity websites very slow or to have users with dual function maintain two accounts, if they cannot afford the Enterprise Edition. If we can figure out how not to count users only when they are actually editing stuff without a trade off cost, then you can be sure that we will do it.

Two system login accounts fails most audits, everytime I now see concurrent it reads currentcon.

If this is in fact your final decision, it is truly a sad day for Telerik. We built our intranet with your product and chose it over your competitors because you did not follow a similar licensing model, and also with the belief that we would be able to take advantage of all the new features in 4.0 that have been touted for so long without this behemothic price increase.

I feel burned, blindsided and mislead by your company. Frankly, for an organization of our size (~80), it would be close to the same amount to purchase Sharepoint Server, even with Enterprise CALs for each member of our organization so we can easily integrate with our other systems, as well as the new hardware to run it. I know this for a fact as I have priced it. As wonderful as I think Sitefinity is, it pales in comparison with the features of MOSS for an Intranet.

if the concurrent user restrictions hold as they are now, I would strongly advise anyone reading this NOT to choose Sitefinity for their intranet platform.

Good news for non-edu (at least if you buy soon)...the 60% is NOT the 50% + 10% educational (which I initally thought)...it's the discount on the upgrade to Pro or Ultimate by the end of the year. 

So this means any org can take advantage of the initial savings (since the pricing isn't changing)

...and that drops to 50% in 2011 until April 15th.

Agree. We will be working on transitioning our 5 sites to Share point.

telerik fyi, you're sending notification emails out with all of our email addresses in the "to" field... :)

(see attached)

It is too bad that there is no support for v. 4.0 for this module, but it has Google Analytics functionality built in and it only costs $149. 

http://www.sitefinity.com/marketplace/modules/sitefinity-3-ultimate-suite.aspx

I believe that Sitefinity has overly reduced the functionality of the free/community edition compared to Kentico CMS.  Most of the features that have been introduced in v. 4.0 are not available in any capacity whatsoever.  This is contrary to many of the features available in Kentico CMS Free Edition.  Many features are available in the Free Edition as well, only in a limited form. 

http://www.kentico.com/Downloads/KenticoCMS_5_Pricing_for_Web.pdf

Even the Kentico CMS Small Business edition currently offers more capabilities than the Sitefinity Small Business edition.

In addition, the licensing for Kentico CMS Free Edition allows for use for commercial as well as personal websites.  This contrasts with Sitefinity CMS Community Edition which does not allow for any commercial usage for websites.

If you ask me, Kentico CMS Free Edition seems a lot more appealing than Sitefinity CMS Community Edition with the new exorbitant pricing structure.

How does Sitefinity v. 4.0 stack against the feature set for Ektron CMS 400.Net?

http://www.ektron.com/Products/Web-CMS/Features/

Guys, unfortunately Telerik has dug their heels in regarding 4.0 licensing. They were completely unwilling to work with our company even though implications were made to us regarding the upgrade path for our intranet, and they stood to make much more profit from us over the long run by working with us but still refused. As you'll notice, Vassil has not responded to any concerns in quite some time.

I know one thing for sure, and that is Telerik is no longer about enabling the developer, and I for one will not spend one more minute of my time helping them resolve any issues I find with the products we currently have under license as I've done in the past. They want to play with the big boys, they better pony-up and have big boy quality control and support. When I find an issue with Microsoft CRM for instance, Microsoft doesn't ask me to "zip up my CRM project and send it to them". Those days are over for sure. The business side of me understands all this, but the tech side of me is quite disheartened.

Hello Everybody

It's not allways about the features but also about the support you are getting. I agree with Samir that it would have been nice to still be able to buy 3.7.

Even get an discount because its old and outdated :-). Just kidding. Love 3.7 and hopped it would be around longer.

But I just read today this quote: "Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great" John D. Rockefeller

So 3.7 was good - and 4.0 WILL be great. Just give Telerik 6 month to catch up with 3.7.

One thing we seem to have noticed is that 4.0 needs more resources and can be a bit hard to run in shared hosting envirements (where small business would be) but if you look at the system requirements of the CMS you linked : http://www.ektron.com/Resources/System-Requirements/  you need at least 4 GB RAM.

So my advice is try to stay around for 6 months and you will have again one of the best CMS at hand.

Markus

Hello Markus,

Thanks for your comment.

You are generally right, but I want to mention one thing.
Both systems have pros and cons. For me, I believe the 4.0 has more things to offer, compared to 3.x. There is especially one big thing that 4.0 has - potential. 4.0 is a platform that you can work on. I am really hoping that we'll get a whitepaper soon from a client, showing this potential - 14 sites hosted in one installation, together with a development story and ideas. 

Our main focus now is to strength the documentation and the samples to show this potential, and of course catch up on features. You will see many things that we are missing now, even with the next official release in Q1 ;).

Kind regards,
Georgi
the Telerik team

@Markus: I agree with Samir that it would have been nice to still be able to buy 3.7.

Perhaps not so much "buy" 3.7, but I definitely think Telerik should (on request) provide a 3.7 license with 4.0 purchases at the moment, so that you can implement using 3.7 if the missing features in 4.0 are a showstopper for you. Microsoft do this with every O/S release... it's called downgrade rights.

The missing FileSystem Storage Provider is a case in point... it's not even scheduled yet (although Q2 has been mooted) which means that if your design depends on it, you're out of luck with Sitefinity.

I remain a Telerik supporter and I agree that V4 should be a much better product than 3.7, once it's complete and debugged, but personally, I have the feeling that won't be before the Q3 release.

@Markus and @MB

The issue here is that if they let people buy a SF 4 license and then download and use SF 3.7 then everyone would just buy the $499 Small Business License and and in effect have a stable, feature rich version of SF that has none of the restrictions that 4.0 has. In effect SF would be cheaper than ever! So it's just not going to happen in my opinion. Again an example of how they've shot themselves in the foot and a large number of their current and potential customers, all with one bullet...

Just my 2 cents.
Phill

@Phil

Not wishing to make more of this than necessary, but would not the "(on request)" part cope with that ?

i.e. You only get a 3.7 license by asking for it, when buying a 4.0 license... and so it shoud be simple enough to limit this to buying 4.0 Standard or higher.

Analogy... you don't get downgrade rights with all versions of Windows.

I think restricting the number of pages to 25 for the Community edition and 50 pages for the Small Business edition is absolutely ridiculous.  It is naive to believe that Small Business sites can easily fit all of their information into just 50 pages.  By being restricted to just 50 pages, it is almost like they are forcing you to cram all the information you can onto the least number of pages. 

I can understand if they limit the feature capabilities of modules within Sitefinity, but it is absolutely absurd to restrict the number of pages which can be published.  If there HAS to be page constraint, make it something more reasonable like 250 or 500 pages.  Most Small Business websites would be able to fit into that page constraint, but 50 pages can add up really quick and it is just not a practical constraint.  As another user stated, you don't see Microsoft following this type of licensing policy with Visual Studio (even the Express editions).  There isn't a constraint that says "you can only develop 50 projects" with the Express edition or "only 100 projects" with the Professional edition.  Instead, they remove features.  Express Edition does not give you an integrated IDE experience across all development languages.  Professional Edition does not have some of the Testing and Architecture features that are in Premium Edition and you can only get Test Manager Professional and Intellitrace with Visual Studio Ultimate Edition.  That is the licensing model that Telerik Sitefinity should use.  Limit by feature set, not by number of pages.

If the new Microsoft Orchard CMS project turns out to be able to accomplish what I need, I may end up using that instead of Sitefinity CMS:  http://orchard.codeplex.com/.  Kentico had the right idea with their licensing model.  They did not originally have a free commercial and personal edition, but now they do in order to more directly compete in the CMS market place.  Also, even though Umbraco and AxCMS are not that appealing as CMS systems, they are still FREE. 

In regards to the v. 4.0 licensing model, it would be even be acceptable and (probably most agreeable with most end-users) if Sitefinity v. 4.0 followed a module-based licensing model similar to a manner to how other numerous organizations follow.  One of the module-based licensing organizations I have worked with in the past has been Globalscape in regards to their EFT Server product.  http://www.cuteftp.com/eft/  Interestingly enough, they recently released their EFT Server product as a completely free base product.  However, if you want to add additional capabilities to the product, you can select amongst their various modules and purchase them individually such as SSH support, Auditing and Reporting, FIPS support etc. 

Therefore, in regards to Sitefinity v. 4.0, customers could purchase a product such as Small Business edition and then purchase any additional modules they needed depending on their needs and requirements.  For example, if they wished to use FormBuilding, they could purchase that module, if they wanted support for Workflow or Multilingual support, they would simply purchase these individual modules for a reasonably priced amount.

I think this is really the best licensing model for Sitefinity v. 4.0 to follow if Telerik continues to remain with the current pricing structure.  In this manner, customers could get the features that they want without having to pay an arm and a leg for more expensive editions of their software.

In regards to one of the responses regarding Small Business licensing--I completely disagree regarding the ability to pay for a $1999 license vs. a $499 license.  The current licensing model available with Sitefinity FORCES businesses to at least purchase the Small Business edition (the Community edition is no longer an option).  Therefore, for a Small Business (such as a startup business, personal consulting business etc.) which only has an income of a few thousand dollars total each year, suddenly having to spend $1999 of that on a content management system is simply too much to ask of a Small Business.  In addition, prior to the generalized use of Content Management Systems, people used to create a tremendous amount of content on a very small number of pages in order to reduce the amount of pages they would have to manually modify through a tool such as Dreamweaver etc.  This resulted in pages which might seem to scroll endlessly.  However, once users have moved to Content Management Systems, they have moved towards smaller content pages and simplified and improved the navigation of the overall web site.  Therefore, a largely HTML-driven website which may have been 20-30 pages in the past, can suddenly explode to 60 or 80 pages very easily due to the ease of creation of these pages. 

Also, if you consider the overall mentality of businesses which desire a "web presence", the overall mentality is that is should be reasonably inexpensive to build an online presence.  Even though most businesses might shy away from a $769 expense on creating a website (plus $200+ yearly maintenance costs), they could still manage that expense with the functionality they were receiving.  However, attempting to justify $1999 for initially creating a website is unreasonable for most businesses.  I have spoken to several businesses that originally adopted Sitefinity decided that it was getting too expensive for them and instead opted for simply going with the website creation tools offered by various hosting providers such as GoDaddy and others.  These systems provide CMS functionality using free tools such as Joomla, Drupal and various others at a fraction of the cost of purchasing a Sitefinity license.  Most businesses that desire a CMS but do not want pay most of their revenue into using a CMS will now tend to avoid Sitefinity and opt for other CMS systems instead.

@Samir Vaidya

Telerik is a business, and makes its own marketing decisions, as it should.
 
Telerik must decide what combination of product, price, placement and promotion (i.e. its marketing plan) is best for its own needs to succeed, and survive.

Time will tell if its plan is correct, and like any business, it will modify that plan if it’s not correct, or if the market changes.

I always present options and alternatives to my customers (including FOS) allowing them to choose the balance of features, price and development cost, that meets their needs and budget.

Personally, I’m yet to find a business that I’d risk doing work for, which would make a strategic decision (such as building a website) based on saving $1K.

By all means, have your say about what you don’t like and what you think, but as the customer, you already have a very simple and effective option available, if you find elements of Telerik’s plan to be in conflict with your (or your customer’s) requirements... buy/use something else.

For me, it all kinda goes back to what Ben originally had an issue with in similar thread:
http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/forums/sitefinity-4-x/general-discussions/sitefinity-4-0-pricing-way-too-high.aspx

Currently, I have one STANDARD license (3.7).  I was in the process of selling SF 4.0 to another client (for the STANDARD edition).  At the time of my selling the client on the $2000 STANDARD license, I was mostly banking on the statement on the pricing comparison page about "50% Discount for multiple domains"...which specifically is worded as "The discount applies for purchases of additional domains of the same license type for the same organization. ".  Now, with the current license that I have IN MY ACCOUNT that I SOLD for Telerik, I assumed that meant that any additional licenses I purchase for the STANDARD edition could be had for the 50% discount....well, apparently that assumption is wrong according to Telerik.  It doesn't seem to matter that I PURCHASED the license...the license resides IN MY account...and that I take full ownership and responsibility for the license. 
Developers/Resellers don't get credit and is not eligible for the 50% discount in this case... bummer.  

Anyway, getting back to the price tag of $2000... is that a lot for SF 4.0 Standard edition?  Well, it might be a little on the high side, but that doesn't bother me too much to list it at that.  Will client's pay that amount??  Not everybody (and I would venture to say not many).  Will SOME pay that amount?  SURE.  Some will.  Here is the underlying problem though.... THAT IS ABOUT ALL THEY WILL PAY.  There is NO ROOM for developers to make any money for the majority of projects in this space.  Yes, there will be the occasional deep pocketed client that can fund a large dev project, but those are far and few between and certainly not what the average developer using Telerik controls/Sitefinity runs their business banking on.  I'm not sure who Telerik is actually targeting with SF 4.0.  Maybe they think they can get the marketing folks at companies to spend $2000 and SF 4.0 turns them into .NET gurus overnight with the ability to customize their site in the same way seasoned developers could....I'm not sure.  But, it sure doesn't seem like the developers are at the forefront in the model.

The other issue that developers (especially news ones to the platform) will have is the "trial license" model.  A lot of developers (again, especially new ones), will take much longer than 30 days to become familar with SF from a technical standpoint.  Yet, if they looking to hone their skills for a client demo of some customization, or just to contribute to the SF Marketplace with some controls... they are NOT able to when their trial license expires (assuming they are doing something that cannot be had in the most basic community edition).  I know that is a big frustration point.  I just don't understand why developers would be cut off in this regard.  It seems Telerik should find a way to embrace new developers to their platform (and keep them more than a couple weeks).

I'm sure Telerik reads our comments and takes things into consideration, but I don't know how much of a difference it is really going to make.  They seem pretty set in stone on a lot of these problems.  I have said this to some of the Telerik folks before...  "Developers drive the business (ANY software platform related business).  Telerik OF ALL people should know this." 

Not adding a lot to the conversation,  but the pricing model is killing us.  We have not won a single bid this year with Sitefinity as our CMS model.  More importantly, we are losing every bid to WordPress, freakin WordPress!  We know the products are not comparable, but non-technical customers do not understand the benefits, no matter how hard we try to explain and demo. They simple see a savings of $2k-20k versus WordPress free license. When we angle DotNetNuke versus Wordpress (free vs free) we win.  

The pricing model is scaring away all small to mid size business, even some large business. Everyone in this thread understands the differences in the products,  but end-customers do not and because of this our bids are dead before we even get to make our pitch.  

I know there is no interest from Telerik in changing the pricing model at this time,  but perhaps you would more help in the sales process by creating marketing papers that show how Sitefinity compares to other popular CMS tools and why it is better?  We love your product but we desperately need help convincing potential clients that it is $20,000 better than WordPress.