Macromedia goes in great length showing of the new Coldfusion MX thingies, but there's a trick to it...

I bought the Dynamic webdesign studio last year consisting of UDev 4, Fireworks 4, Flash 5 AND Coldfusion 5 ENTERPRISE EDITION...

I just spotted the trick here...to upgrade my production Coldfusion server I need to fork out € 5000,-- ! In addition to the € 399,-- for the upgrade to studio MX with the Coldfusion MX DEVELOPER edition (a 1 client limited server ?!) as opposed to my full coldfusion 5 ENTERPRISE edition (unlimited client server).

BAH BAH BAH, btw i noticed KPN stocks very low again, i doubt i can give enough motivation to my manager to spend such a huge amount of money in these hard times for KPN, dutch people will know that there's a huge budget cut made last year and other drastic measures were taken to reduce costs, my manager will never be convinced to spend almost $ 5000,-- for a server license not when we have tons of oracle licences in house and my current server has a disabled oracle web server installed on it, not to mention the staffware server, sql server and tons of other CRAP that is just taking up space in my eyes (except SQL 7 offcourse).

Can anyone give me pointers on how to convince my 2 direct managers to make such a huge investment in something that, in their eyes, are allready so many alternative solutions for inhouse (meaning no extra costs). Or am I better off with the CF 5 enterprise ?
Those new MX tag edit modes do look cool <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile_sad.gif border=0 align=middle>

With kind regards,

Dennis van Galen
Webmaster KPN Services
Financial and Information Services

First of all price is not all that counts. If using CF allows you to work 20% faster for example, then it's an easy calculation how long you need to work for your boss untill he saves on spending so many dollars on the server. But of course such counting depends on many other variables.

Macromedia has several interesting pages online that could help you:

www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/productinfo/competitive/
www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/productinfo/faq/general/#g500
www.macromedia.com/software/coldfusion/proven/

I'm sure that there's more available at their website when you have another look.

Waldo Smeets -- www.UDzone.com Co-Founder
------------------------------------------
UDzone.com: The site for Macromedia
Dreamweaver UltraDev Developers!

Thanks Waldo, that helped. Especially the case studies.

But now i'm not sure if I want to use it, cause it's been giving me headaches since i first downloaded it, i can't get the CF thingies to show up in the website API config panel and for some reason dw MX doesn't recognise the server, took me a week (trying it on my free time) before it saw my asp server and i still can't use live data in dw MX with asp/java. I requested assistance on the MM forums but no luck.

I installed it (CFMX) 5 times now, it won't install ontop of my IIS5, it needs to be standalone and the instructions in the install.pdf on MM website are incorrect and vague and doesn't go into what to do if it returns invalid usage error. I can display .cfm pages now, but that's about the end of it. If you ask me, you need a system engineer to get them to work together as opposed to the old studio, just install and off you go. Perfect roundtrip editing has now become a pain, surely that can't be what MM had in mind with the new range of products.

I'll keep trying and hoping someone from MM spots the frustration in my messages before I decide that the upgrade is not worth the extra time and frustration, not to mention lack of sleep, i got the CFMX to actually show pages for the first time at 6am this morning, after trying since 10pm last night. I don't see any decrease in development time yet only a huge increase in things i shouldn't even be concerned with as webdeveloper.

With kind regards,

Dennis van Galen
Webmaster KPN Services
Financial and Information Services