Hi Bruce,

That's an interesting question here.
Actually if we were doing like you suggest, Studio would only be an XML generator, while the proposed value to our customers is much more: keeping all the configuration in Studio is an guarantee for the customer to be able to upgrade to a newer version of Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (for instance to be able to use coming Nuxeo Drive) without having to modify the customization. A lot of work is done on this side and even more work will be done in the future, caring automatically of some data migration issues, etc…

Furthermore, one of the main issues of ECM and data management apps is to gain user interest so as to really get the expected ROI. Driving an ECM project with a 6 months specifications, 12 months implementation and 5 years of use can be a necessity in some highly regulated environments (aviation, automative, …) but in most of the cases we encourage our community and customers to have an on-going approach, being reactive to your users requirements etc… exactly the way a SAAS app is driven for instance. Temporary use would be of poor interest here

Finally, in an open source company, online services and service offering has two main goals:

• like in every company to help customers manage successfully their project
• more than in proprietary company: participate to the business model of the company and make sure that platform will continue growing the next coming years. Companies choosing Nuxeo today at infrastructure level do a long term choice and can do this because the company prooved its business model enabled such guarantee. Let's let people for who it is the job taking care of all this :)

We are glad of the interest your find for Nuxeo Studio , thank you !

There is an offer without support, which is Connect Base and only provides Studio + maintenance