View from the Edge

Exchange Online 2010 Thoughts

We have completed our second Exchange Online, a "virtual conference" on the Intertubes.

All the content will be available for on-demand viewing via web browser until mid December 2010. You can watch the session recordings, listen to the question and answer segments, and download all the slide decks. Go to http://www.progress.com/exchange2010 if you want to see the on-demand stuff.

If you have not seen it yet, I highly recommend Anne Disney's talk entitled "The Few, the Proud, the Excellent: Producing High Quality Software in a Small Shop". It was without a doubt the best talk of the conference.

Here is a tip which may be useful for watching: the videos use Flash and the Flash player browser plug-in has an inbuilt "zoom" feature that you can use to enlarge video to a size other than full screen, which is what you get if you press the zoom button on the lower right below the video. Full screen turns out to bee too big, at least for me.

To activate the browser Flash plug-in zoom feature, right click on the video (ctrl click on macs). You get a menu with "Zoom In" and several other options. This feature is disabled by some browsers (IE for one) but it works in Opera, Firefox, and Safari.

There are some definite advantages to online conferences. Reaching more people from more far-away places is one of them. We had an audience made up of people from 66 countries, at last count. Second, everything is available after the conference is over so you can see anything you might have missed and you can watch things more than once. Third, you don't have to spend any money to go somewhere.

In her day 3 recap, Colleen Smith said "maybe it is time to bring back the “in-person” conference of the old days". I couldn't agree more. An online conference doesn't allow high-quality interaction with other people.

All things considered, a meatspace conference is just better. Unintended conversations and discussions about all sorts of things are easy, natural, and frequent. There is usually more and deeper content. Most speakers are available to answer questions for extended periods in hallways, lounges, at meals, and in the bar. Even better, speakers can ask the audience questions too.

Live talks often go in unexpected directions and the speakers are usually much more lively. I can't think of anything more boring than listening to me drone on about stuff to people I can't see.

I always learn a lot from the audience at meatspace conferences. Not at online conferences and I've been to many, not just ours.

I think there are fewer distractions too. When you're there, you're more involved.

Here's hoping next year we do an "in person" conference.

Exchange Online Day 3 Recap

Today marked the third and final day of the live portion of the Progress Exchange 2010 Online Conference.  I was quite pleased with the content as well the attendance, and want to thank all of the attendees that joined us from around the world.  We’ve heard some great feedback about the content that was provided by Progress and our global OpenEdge community.

Today’s focus surrounded how attendees could future-proof their applications. We heard from long time Progress community member, Thomas Mercer-Hursh from Computing Integrity Inc., who explained the when, why and how of object orientation. We also heard some best practices for developing an application for several platforms. This taught attendees how to create a single-user display for multiple platforms, such as iPads, remote users, as well as desktops. Finally, we learned about new web-based technologies, including the latest from Microsoft Silverlight.

Another theme today was managing and deploying applications in the cloud. Progress’s Brian Bowman explained how we could work the cloud for operational recovery. This includes supporting and managing the service levels of your customers. Additionally, we heard about Progress Sonic, and how attendees can use this tool to stay on top of integration requirements as they look to deliver their applications as a service.  Sonic will be part of our cloud-enablement services included in Arcade as announced earlier in the conference.

To wrap up the conference, two Progress partners provided us with case studies. The IFDS Group shared with us how they were able to modernize their application to achieve high performance as a service provider. Additionally, we heard from Paul Hernandez-Cuebas about the VictualNet SaaS journey over the past few years, including lessons learned and best practices.

What a great end to a great conference. Again, I want to thank all of the wonderful attendees and speakers from the Progress community around the world. We hope you can join us for the conference again next year and who knows – maybe it is time to bring back the “in-person” conference of the old days.  We will keep you posted, but in the meantime, if you attended please be sure to fill out the conference survey and provide us with your feedback.

Exchange Online Day 2 Recap

Wow, another great day at the Progress Exchange Online 2010 Conference.  A few technical glitches, but I guess that is to be expected when you are delivering all the content that we tried to deliver in such a short period of time.  Today was all about the Progress developer community, as well as how Progress partners are moving their applications into the cloud.

 

We heard from many members of the Progress community on the subject of developer best practices.   The sessions included: how to better operate and manage your OpenEdge applications; how to develop the right User Interface for end-users; and finally, some great tips about application modernization.

 

Our partners, including BravePoint, Future Proof Software, and Great Valley Technologies, highlighted how attendees could take advantage of the latest technologies to create applications with an updated look and feel to support the next generation of users.

 

We also heard more about how our customers and partners are thinking about and making the move to Cloud Computing. This included a great session from Progress’s own Rich Banville, who introduced us to the concept of multi-tenant tables, which is one of the newest features of the OpenEdge platform that everyone is excited about, especially those that are looking to move to a SaaS business model.

 

Joining me on stage was two of our more leading-edge SaaS application partners, Bluebird Auto Rental Systems and Wilke Thornton, who shred insights and experiences with the Progress community regarding cloud deployment, supporting multi-tenancy, along with just some of the fundamentals about running a SaaS business.

 

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference and I know it will be just as great as the first two, in terms of content (with hopefully some of the resolution and streaming issues addressed).  We will hear some more customer case studies, and learn more about deploying in the cloud. I know many folks are also eager to listen in on the sessions about future proofing applications through new technologies and modernization.

 

Again, if you have missed any of the conference, it will be available for the next 90 days On Demand, so it is not too late to participate in Exchange Online 2010.

Exchange Online Day 1 - A recap!

Wow, what a great opening day of the Progress Exchange Online 2010 Conference – and a great turn out too! Today we welcomed over 2,000 attendees from 66 countries around the world. We even had over 100 attendees in Australia listening to sessions at 1:00am!

 

We really like the concept of a virtual conference, as we would not otherwise be able to reach as many dedicated users. It shows how global not only our partner and customer base is, but also the interest around the world in hearing about solutions that enable the development of more operationally responsiveness business applications.

 

Rick Reidy and Dr. John Bates kicked the conference off with a great general session on Progress Today and Responsive Process Management. They were able to highlight what Progress is doing for our existing customers and partners – specifically providing them with the solutions needed to address changing business requirements.

 

And that brings me to what today was all about – two big announcements about our OpenEdge SaaS platform.

 

The first announcement was about Progress Arcade.  OpenEdge ISVs and end users are telling us they want to be able to move to the cloud quickly and easily – so it was Progress’s goal to simplify this move as much as possible.  The Arcade environment provides software developers with the means to test, demonstrate, and deploy their cloud-enabled business applications using the integrated Progress OpenEdge SaaS platform.

 

The second announcement was our Progress OpenEdge BPM initiative. Business applications are continuing to evolve and so is the way they are being built. We are integrating the business process modeling, monitoring and management capabilities of the Progress Savvion™ BPM product with Progress OpenEdge.  This will provide our ISV partners and customers with new capabilities for building applications for continuous business process improvements.  This is how we see business applications being built in the future – truly business process-enabled.

 

After 30 years in business, hopefully our partners and customers saw today that Progress still knows how to deliver the tools they need to succeed!

 

I look forward to all the great sessions that will be going on tomorrow! 

Join us for a Discussion on Load Testing with Gus Bjorklund

 

Upon joining Progress in 1989, Gus Bjorklund fixed bugs in Progress 4.2N. Since then, Gus has joined the OpenEdge Best Practices team and he has worked on various initiatives, focusing primarily on the OpenEdge RDBMS. He has been a frequent speaker at Progress conferences and user group events and was an executive producer and session presenter during Progress' first online conference in 2009.

 

During Progress Exchange Online 2010, Gus will be returning as a producer and speaker and in his presentation, "Introduction 2 Load Testing", he will explain the real benefits of load testing OpenEdge applications and how to get started doing it.

 

Load testing is useful for a variety of purposes, including capacity planning, system sizing, regression testing, stress testing, and proving your application's performance and scalability to sales prospects. The key, as is the case with many other kinds of projects, is planning. Testing everything an application does is usually impractical so an important element of planning for load testing is deciding what to leave out.

 

Join Gus at his session "Introduction 2 Load Testing" at Exchange Online 2010 on Tuesday September 14, 2010 at 10:30 am. For more information and to register, please visit www.progress.com/exchange2010

 

OpenEdge Applications in the Amazon Cloud

Roy Ellis has been working for Progress Software since 1995. He started in Technical Support where he supported the Progress database on all operating systems for versions 6 to 8 before transitioning into development. He was a member of the development teams that brought you WebSpeed, AppServer, NameServer, AdminServer, and most recently OpenEdge Explorer and Management (formerly Fathom Management).  As a Principle QA Engineer he still regularly participates in customer calls with Technical Support. His most recent project is in the "Cloud", investigating and helping customers leverage the power of Amazon EC2 and OpenEdge.

Roy started working with the "Cloud" when he was asked to help an Application Partner deploy his SaaS (Software as a Service) Application to the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) platform.  From the very beginning he was impressed by the potential of this emerging infrastructure.  The Amazon EC2 and S3 (Simple Storage Service) are the basis for Amazon's IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).  This gives the ability to start, stop and manage virtual machines in the internet.  Amazon EC2 users can run any product they wish on these virtual machines.  They can backup and protect data in the internet on virtual file systems.  They have nearly unlimited resources at their disposal and they pay only for what you use!

Although there are many cloud providers available, OpenEdge started with Amazon, one of the largest providers, supporting both Windows and Linux operating systems.  Amazon has a very active development staff and has good documentation and forum support and they also have a very competitive pricing strategy.  Roy has written several "Getting Started" white papers to help users register with Amazon and then install and test their application in the Amazon Cloud and he's currently working on writing other best practices for the cloud.

Roy expects the Cloud to change the SaaS environment much in the way it has changed many other businesses and our everyday life.  The music industry is still trying to adapt to users purchasing music from the internet and not on media.  The television industry is currently seeing a shift to internet viewing and is struggling to adapt.  The telecommunication industry has probably changed the most so far.  And who can imagine a world without Facebook, instant messaging or Tweeting? 

Roy does not think all applications will be deployed to the "Cloud" but that it will become a powerful segment of the market.  The power of the internet will once again change business and as it does, Roy continues to investigate Cloud providers and services for OpenEdge Application Providers and for Release 11.

Join Roy and hundreds of other OpenEdge users for Progress Exchange Online on Tuesday, September 14^th at 11:15 AM EDT and hear Roy talk about OpenEdge Applications in the Amazon Cloud. To register, please visit www.progress.com/exchange2010