Thank you Michael. That was very helpful.
I have been selling customized and boilerplate training delivered through
other LMS or our LMS to companies for the last 2 years. I believe that the
sales and marketing of our product is going to be very similar to what you will
experience with dotLRN. I have not been selling aspects of the community
functionality found in the OpenACS; therefore, I can only comment on what I
believe you will experience with dotLRN.
In my experience, many of the large companies want to host their training
internally, because the training may contain sensitive information that they
want to keep secure internally.
Most of these companies run Apache on some of their servers and have
never heard of AOLServer. Their IT people are scared about supporting
another HTTP server, because they have corporately dictated configurations
that adhere to specific security criteria. They want us to plug into their current
systems.
In July of 2002, the Netcraft Web Server Survey of 35,991,815 sites
determined that 65.21% were running Apache. Our company can not ignore
that kind of number. If there is no solution like OpenACS or dotLRN for
Apache, an efficient mod_nsd could be a tremendous opportunity.
If it is impossible to create a mod_nsd that wll perform well, then it is not an
issue, but I believe that it would be the most effective way to sell dotLRN
development, implementation, or support work.
I would think that the first step would be to fund a partial port that would (a)
give us a better sense of what we'd be up against and (b) give us some
benchmarks on representative functions that would give us a clue as to
eventual performance.
What representative functions do you believe would be the best to port first?
-CR
