ColdFusion in the Enterprise BOF: Takeaways

I have now made several blog posts on my Promoting ColdFusion Outside of the ColdFusion Community Birds of a Feather (BOF), but I have yet to post on my ColdFusion in the Enterprise BOF.  I thought I'd correct that, as there were some interesting things that came out of that as well.

This BOF went a different direction than I expected.  A great deal of the hour focussed on the problems enterprise application providers have selling ColdFusion solutions.  There are many IT teams that just won't allow ColdFusion, mostly due to a lack of knowledge on how to support it.  Even though solution providers can produce apps that can be deployed on J2EE servers, the additional price tag of a CF license is a big barrier in many cases.  There has been some change going on, especially with CFMX 7 and CF 8 have been released, but the problem still exists, and it's not likely to go away any time soon.  Some desire was expressed to see a new kind of ColdFusion publishing license which might make it easier to sell a ColdFusion application, bundled with an application specific ColdFusion deployment on J2EE servers, may really help allow more companies develop solutions written in ColdFusion.  It was mentioned that BlueDragon's license does allow this, but I got the distinct impression that the people in attendance specifically want to see this kind of license from Adobe.

There was some discussion in the political game fought in many companies on getting ColdFusion in the enterprise.  When the productivity gains were shown to many IT managers in proof of concepts and prototypes, ColdFusion got the go-ahead, but there has been a wave of standardization seen in many IT organizations, and these often focus around .NET.  Microsoft's marketing monolith often penetrates companies and tries to eliminate all other solutions, but .NET can't match the productivity of ColdFusion and there are often rogues that won't give up CF no matter how hard pressure comes in from the upper echelons of management, due to their successes using ColdFusion.

There was another BOF that tackled ColdFusion Developer Hiring 101, but this BOF also tackled the difficulties in finding good ColdFusion developers.  Some have resorted to hiring out of college or hired experienced developers with no ColdFusion experience and teaching them ColdFusion on the job, often with very good results.  I think this is a technique many other companies should try and was encouraged by the positive results others have experienced.

Update - Ryan Thompson-Jewell also suggested I neglected to mention... that we need the ability to administer multiple ColdFusion servers/instances from a single point of entry. For example, if you have to add a datasource to ten servers, you make a change in a central place and the change propagates across the server farm. Being able to do it through an AIR application would be nice. I was expecting to hear more about integration with other systems, and this was touched upon, as well as team and environment setup, as well as APIs, web services and other enterprise issues, but we didn't get in them as much as I thought we would.  The big takeaways were:

• A CF Publishing License - Solution providers want a new kind of publishing license that would allow companies to bundle ColdFusion with their software without the big price tag.
• Office Politics - ColdFusion often faces a tough road against infrastructure and management.  This is often fought with proof of productivity gains that ColdFusion brings.
• Good Developers can become Good CF Developers - Finding college grads and seasoned developers in another language and teaching them ColdFusion seems to meet with some success.
• Central Administration Tool (Updated) - To allow administrators to make changes in a server farm from one central place and propagate the changes automatically.

Thanks to everyone that participated in this BOF! It certainly was a good one!