DNN Software: Powering 750K+ Sites Worldwide to Help Businesses Seamlessly Deploy Content, Engage Audiences, and Measure Results

TL; DR: For more than a decade, DNN Software’s web content management (WCM) solution has acted as the foundation for hundreds of thousands of websites, helping businesses effectively engage audiences online. Now, with the release of Evoq 9, the company has evolved its WCM into a decoupled CMS that provides omnichannel publishing. This gives businesses the opportunity to reach customers where they are with the right content — all from a centralized interface. For enterprises building custom business applications, DNN’s extensibility model provides a framework that boosts efficiencies and optimizes operational costs. With a focus on educating its partners on market trends and a forward-facing philosophy to develop applications around how content is consumed, DNN is allowing businesses to create customer-centric experiences that drive revenue.

Lane Boyd is Digital Communications Manager at Texas Hospital Association (THA). In planning a redesign of THA’s website, he looked for a new Content Management System (CMS) that could grow and adapt to the association’s needs.

According to Lane, “We needed a new CMS that we would still be using in 2025.” After evaluating a number of CMS vendors, he chose the Evoq CMS from DNN Software. Evoq’s extensibility model was a strong selling point for Lane: One of his requirements was seamless integration between his CMS and his Association Management System (AMS).

As an advocacy organization for the state’s hospitals and healthcare systems, THA wants to keep members up to date with industry changes. According to Lane, “We strive for near-continuous content updates. We want our site to provide new and fresh content to satisfy the needs of our members.”

Lane needed a CMS that could support his publishing needs while providing the necessary permissions and workflow to manage THA’s growing team of content contributors.

According to Will Morgenweck, VP of Product Management at DNN Software, DNN has traditionally served mid-market businesses. However, with the latest release of Evoq 9, enterprise-level organizations have taken notice of the value offered by the solution’s omnichannel contextual content deployment capabilities.

Evoq is more than just a web content management system. The product provides a platform marketers can take advantage of to pump out content to multi-channel audiences and a foundation for developers to more easily create their businesses’ mission-critical applications.

“We’re seeing more and more enterprises take advantage of our technology,” Will said. “Evoq 9 builds on cloud infrastructure to provide what we’re calling Features-as-a-Service (FaaS). We’re now moving to a microservices architecture to provide features to customers from the cloud.”

Will told us enterprises have a lot of complex needs surrounding content deployment, especially when it comes to delivering it to audiences in the correct contexts. The way consumers are digesting content is changing, and it’s DNN’s aim to lead the charge into optimizing the way information is disseminated.

“While websites are important today, in a short time they will become less critical as we see voice user interfaces interacting with home assistants, mobile, et cetera.” Will said. “Companies are going to need to manage their content and allow it to go wherever it needs to be.”

This level of content management is exactly what Evoq 9 allows businesses to do. Evoq’s microservices architecture enables DNN to provide the new and popular Liquid Content offering to facilitate omnichannel content publishing.

“It gives the ability to manage content in a single location and allows it to be published on different channels — not only your website, but also into social platforms and IoT,” Will said. “Businesses don’t just want to take the same piece of content and put it on a website and an app. It needs to be contextual to the channel it’s delivered in.”

Will told us this microservices architecture lets businesses grow their content footprints without having to worry about infrastructure. DNN is able to deliver the features and manage the ongoing functionality of the software. It’s similar to a SaaS model where updates are continuously pumped out to customers so they don’t have to purchase expensive upgrades.

Another huge perk of employing Evoq is found in its real-time editing and analytics. DNN’s In-Context Editing tools allow users to navigate to a page and make revisions on the spot. This was something always available, but now DNN’s solution includes In-Context Analytics. With this tool, users can obtain an analytical snapshot through a direct overlay on the page being visited. Will noted this is especially useful in reducing the time it takes to scour through data when running separate analytics systems.

Most businesses measure ROI by the efficiencies and cost savings provided by a solution, and Will told us DNN answers both. Evoq’s platform offers a foundation upon which to quickly and cost-effectively build mission-critical applications.

“Our extensibility model is key when organizations need to develop their own custom lines of business applications,” Will said. “We provide a framework giving developers a lot of features they’re comfortable using while eliminating some of the extra work they may have to do.”

Here, Will noted, time savings is paramount. Ultimately, it boils down to a reduction of hours spent in development and getting apps to market much faster. Developers using DNN’s framework and following the company’s best practices, such as not modifying the source code, don’t have to worry about the underlying core applications.

The concept is simple yet effective. DNN gives developers the foundation so they can focus on the applications they’re building. Will told us it’s similar to developing apps for an OS.

“I kind of equate it to an operating system,” he said. “If they’re developing something for Windows, they’re not worried about rebuilding the operating system every time — they’re taking advantage of the operating system. We’re an equivalent to that operating system for their website.”

This way, developers get to take advantage of upgrade paths and security fixes that come directly from DNN, which dramatically streamlines the development process.

For mid-market businesses without the resources to build their own custom applications, DNN’s marketplace offers a solution. The marketplace provides an ecosystem of tools and extensions developed by third-party vendors SMBs can immediately bring to market.

“They don’t have to have everything custom developed,” Will said. “They can go to the marketplace and get the add-ons they need. There is also a wide variety of consultants available to help them deploy and, ultimately, save them money.”

In addition to providing its customers comprehensive content management and deployment, DNN’s Customer Success Team balances listening to and addressing customer needs with a consultative approach that recognizes market trends. This ensures DNN’s customers are taking advantage of the latest technology and employing industry best practices.

“Oftentimes, customers are hyper-focused on their immediate needs and not thinking about the future,” Will said. “So, it’s our responsibility to relay information about market trends to the customer so they can make the best decisions.”

Will told us customers have been succeeding and preparing for long-term growth because of this dialogue. And DNN benefits, too.

“Our in-house development efforts are about 50:50 based on what we’re hearing from our customers and what’s going on in the market,” he said. “We try to stay on top of both.”

According to Will, this approach of constantly keeping an ear to the ground has created an environment and culture centered on innovation and experimentation.

It’s because of this forward-thinking methodology that DNN is helping customers create content once and publish it anywhere. It’s also why DNN’s latest version of Evoq is attracting so many enterprise-level clients. Will noted the key has been to continuously make it easier for businesses to develop content-rich applications and give them the ability to deploy content across channels.

“You’ve probably heard of the term ‘headless CMS,’” Will said. “I think one of our advantages is our application can operate just like a headless CMS, but we give you the tools to render and distribute your content, whereas some of the true headless CMS systems don’t allow that.”

The other piece of the puzzle, Will noted, is analytics. For the past year, DNN has been laser focused on instrumenting content and gathering data about how that content is being consumed.

“We’ve been looking very closely at how visitors are interacting with the content,” he said. “We now have a ton of data, so the next few releases will be centered on building applications around that data.”

One use case, Will noted, would be to automate personalization. Instead of marketers having to manually define rules and personas, DNN’s solution would use the data gathered to provide insights about visitors to guide marketers on creating personalization metrics that lead to improved conversion rates.

“Our goal is to give our customers full visibility into their content and data footprints,” Will said.