This blog is an open discussion of what it takes to design, build, integrate and manage the world's best business applications using Progress OpenEdge.
BPM & RPM. Just a couple of new TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms) or does it really mean something to your OpenEdge application? Progress has been talking a lot lately about Business Process Modeling and Responsive Process Management and for good reason. The Progress suite of products in these areas are second to none. But what does it really mean to OpenEdge? Listen to Ken Wilner, VP Engineering, as he talks to Marv and Mike about how OpenEdge customers can use this technology now and going forward.
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
Gary Clink is an experienced OpenEdge Consultant and pre-sales Engineer working for Progress Software from their UK office. Gary joined Progress in 1999 having previously worked for a Direct End-User (DEU) in the Petrochemicals industry and also for an OpenEdge Application Partner (AP) working in the Transportation, Whisky (yes Whisky), and Personnel/Payroll industries.
Gary, having learned OpenEdge as part of his university degree, some 16 years ago, has always been interested in the rapid creation of business transaction processing applications. Gary has had a particular flair for development frameworks (having work with such frameworks as OpenStart, PS:eScript, Progress Dynamics, SmartObjects, and a number of others). Software Configuration Management has also played a key focus in Gary's career – having successfully deployed dozens of Roundtable TSMS implementations to address such things as version control, build management, deployment management, and legislative compliancy such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
Gary is currently focused as a Pre-Sales Engineer on helping large direct enterprise companies and government in the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia to expand their current Progress estate and to open up new technical and commercial possibilities using the complimentary products from Progress's extensive portfolio.
In Gary's session, Know your ABC's: Business Transaction Management with Progress OpenEdge in the Cloud, Gary will demonstrate how some of the complimentary Progress' products enhance the OpenEdge experience for business Transaction Management. Business Transaction Management (BTM) is a critical component in the new IT/Business relationship. Progress Actional, Progress's first class BTM product, translates data relating to an underlying IT estate into information that is relevant to various business stakeholders including Operations Staff, Application Development, quality Assurance, and Security & compliance personnel. With this knowledge the various stakeholders can make informed decisions, often proactively, to ensure the success of every critical Business Transactions necessary for the day-to-day running of a business. Progress Actional also offers the capabilities of automating operational Service Leven Agreements (SLA) against this estate, thus preventing issues or alerting appropriate staff to problems before they have even happened.
Based on the centuries old Hippocratic oath of "first do no harm!", all of this is achieved by using Progress Actional's patented technology; which combines centralized management with distributed policy evaluation, ensures no server bottlenecks and therefore no degradation in an applications performance. Actional has been performing this function for several years for technologies such as Java, .NET, Corba, Middleware, Enterprise Service Busses, WebService, MainFrame Integration, etc. Now, starting with OpenEdge 10.2B, support for the OpenEdge platform is also included for key components such as WebSpeed Transaction Server, WebService Adaptors, Sonic Adaptors, AppServers, AppServer Internet Adaptors, and OpenEdge batch clients. What's really exciting is that all of this is achieved without having to modify your existing application, changed your application's behavior or write a single line of new ABL code. In addition to examining OpenEdge's support for Actional, during this session we'll also see how Progress Actional can be used alongside the Amazon Web Service (AWS) platform for application monitoring and Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management on the Cloud.
Come and join Gary in his session "Know Your ABC's: Business Transaction Management with Progress OpenEdge in the Cloud" on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at 9:45 a.m. EDT. To register for Progress Exchange Online 2010, go to www.progress.com/exchange2010
Planning is well underway and we are now accepting session proposals for Exchange Online 2010. Following on from the success of Exchange Online 2009, combined with your feedback and suggestions, we are confirming Exchange Online 2010 for September 14, 15, and 16.
As always, the goal of our Exchange conference is to deliver practical and highly valuable technical content relative to developing, integrating, and managing applications using OpenEdge and related technologies, as well as to provide a general understanding of related market technology trends.
To get all the details on submitting a proposal, please go to the call for speakers site, and remember your proposal must be submitted by May 7th in order to be considered.
We are looking forward to a very exciting and innovative conference. Come back to this blog, as well as the call for speakers site for all the latest information on the conference.
We made a key part of our strategy for 2010 support for the OpenEdge community. We think we have a very compelling story with what we have delivered in OpenEdge 10.2B, and what we are working on in OpenEdge 11. Everything we are hearing supports that so we want to ensure that the story is getting out.
In that vein, we are providing strong support for the numerous PUG (Progress User Group) events that are being held around the world. In fact a couple of weeks ago I was in the London at the UK PUG event held in our corporate offices in Slough and in Lillehammer, Norway (O.K. It was actually Øyer) presenting to a combined Sweden/Norway Pug event.
Both events had 40-50 people, a nice collection of sessions covering a broad range of topics including several sessions by me. At both events I shared with the attendees the Progress vision for Operational Responsiveness, and introduced them to RPM (Responsive Process Management). I also reviewed with them the key features in OpenEdge 10.2B including Transparent Data Encryption, and introduced them to some of the key features in OpenEdge 11 including Multi-tenant Tables, Multi-tenant AppServer, and our thoughts around automated deployment to the cloud.
In Norway I also went into detail in terms of a number of best practices around building SaaS including multi-tenancy, UI flexibility, etc.
And there were lots of other great sessions as well. In the UK, British Airways gave a very comprehensive session on how they used Sonic, Actional, and DataXtend to build out a robust SOA infrastructure. Gary Clink showed how to achieve Business Transaction Assurance within your IT infrastructure using Actional and the AutoEdge sample application. There were other great sessions on SaaS, OO, and BI as well.
Two of Progress' technology partners, Mike Fechner and Robert Prediger showed how OpenEdge is open and flexible enough that you can really use it with whatever UI technology you want. Mike showed how the OpenEdge GUI for .NET is great for building compelling desktop UIs and showed some tools that simplify migrating from the OpenEdge GUI to the GUI for .NET.
Robert showed how you can build AJAX style UIs for your OpenEdge application and showed off his Backbase-enabled framework to help you get there.
And there were other sessions on the latest Progress corporate positioning, and on application and database tuning as well.
But the PUGs are not just about learning and technical content. They are about socializing and networking with your peers in the OpenEdge community. It's about building the relationships that will help you to be more effective down the road at doing your job. In the UK they had a very comfortable dinner on the evening before the event. And in Norway they did something that truly fit in with the culture and environment that we were in and is certainly fits in with what I like to do best. I think these videos speak for themselves.
So if you are not a member of your local PUG, please join. And if you are a member, plan to go to the next event. Offer to do a session that you think will help the other members. Not only will you learn something, and help others learn, but you will meet a lot of good people, and have a lot of fun.
If you have been following this blog lately you can see there has been a lot of focus on customer-facing engagements including Exchange Online, the UK PUG, and Australia Exchange.I just returned from the Brazil Exchange event, I’ll tell you about that in a minute, and you’ll hear about other events in upcoming posts about other customer facing events over the next few days.
So do we do it?Why so many events?Well we think we have an exciting and compelling strategy with OpenEdge 10.2B being released in a few weeks, work starting on OpenEdge 11, and a lot of focus on SaaS and Cloud.But we also want to hear from you.So speak up and be counted.Make sure your account team knows about your issuesand concerns, go to a local PUG event or other regional event, and tell the Progress representative what you think, or head over to Progress Communities , and layout your thoughts in one of our forums.
But now onto Brazil.Brazil Exchange, held in Sao Paulo on Oct. 21, was another extremely successful event with over 525 attendees.The general session was very much focused on Operational Responsiveness and how the entire Progress portfolio of products can help you achieve Operational Responsiveness.As part of the General Session, Rick Kuzyk put together a very exciting demo showing OpenEdge, Apama, Sonic, and Actional all working together to provide real-time visibility in an automobile manufacturing yard complete with a mashup using Google maps, and showed the dashboard running on an iPhone.Very slick!!
And there were 15 different breakout sessions covering OpenEdge, Actional, and Apama, and while they were “all Portuguese to me” (literally - except for mine and Rick’s), there was lots of interest in the key capabilities that we are providing including OpenEdge GUI for .NET (sold out crowd) , OpenEdge support for Actional, OpenEdge Management, and RIA.
Excellent job by the Brazilian team, and I would like to thank all of our Brazilian customers for attending this event.
And don’t forget, there is a great collection of presentations still available on the Exchange Online site, so check it out because it all goes away on December 17th!!!
On October 1st, if you are a user of Progress technology and reside in the London, England area the Progress User Group (PUG) meeting was the place to be.
Forty PUG members and twenty perspective members attended the meeting to learn and hear from customers and Progress Executives. Ken Wilner, VP of Technology shared the OpenEdge roadmap which prompted a lively discussion regarding market insights and future requirements. There was a customer presentation and sessions on the Cloud, Application Modernization and SaaS.
In case you missed it the UK PUG was the winner of the Exchange Online 2009 PUG contest. As the PUG with the most Exchange registered attendees, at 44, refreshments were on Progress. No PUG meeting would be complete without prizes and networking opportunities.
New PUG meetings are always being added to Progress Communities. Don't miss the next PUG meeting in your area…there's always something new and interesting to learn!
Exchange Online 2009 has come, but it’s not gone. With over 2,000 participants from every continent
around the world attending 36 sessions on diverse topics such as:
•Introducing OpenEdge GUI for .NET,
•Serializing ProDataSets to JSON,
•Introducing OpenEdge Explorer, and
•Transparent Data Encryption,
the event was a resounding success!!
In addition, the live Q&A that was held for each session,
and networking forums where attendees could “chat” with OpenEdge developers,
architects and engineers, as well as the leaders of several Progress User
Groups (PUGs), while maybe not exactly the same as meeting someone face-to-face
gave that personal touch to this online event.
Did you miss a session that you really wanted to hear? Is there one that was so full of information
that you just have to hear it again?Is
there a session that a co-worker of yours really should have listened to? Did you miss the event all together?Regardless of your reason for still wanting
to see a particular session you still can, because all the sessions are still
available on-demand on the Exchange Online 2009 site until December 17th.
And don’t forget if you have a question on any session,
Progress Communities is the place to ask your question. We’ve set up a separate forum for each
session, so that you can be sure you question is answered in a timely fashion.
Lastly, don’t forget to check out the Resource Center when
you are on the Exchange Online 2009 site.This is where you can download the slides and related materials for all
sessions, as well as find other Progress product related materials.
Ken Wilner
P.S. O.K. You caught me.There was no one from Antarctica.
Progress OpenEdge is pleased to announce the opening of registration for the OpenEdge 10.2B Beta Program!
Would
you like an early preview and test run of the next release of OpenEdge?
By participating in the OpenEdge 10.2B Beta you can provide feedback on
new features and get a head-start on your new development.
OpenEdge 10.2B introduces many new capabilities to extend and enhance your application, including:
OpenEdge Transparent Data Encryption, allowing
your application to comply with regulations regarding the encryption
of data at rest without having to change your application.
Support for JSON (Java Script Notation) to and from Prodatasets, making it easier to develop an Ajax UI.
Actional Interceptors for OpenEdge, allowing you to take advantage of the power of Actional to support Business Transaction Assurance.
To get more details about OpenEdge 10.2B and to register for the Beta head on over to the Beta Registration Web site.
Mark your calendars and head on over to the Exchange Online 2009 site to register.Exchange Online promises to be a very exciting, engaging, and interactive event that you can enjoy from the comfort of your own home or office.With 36 sessions spread across 6 different tracks, there promises to be something for everyone.
There will be plenty of sessions on SaaS, and integration, and UI flexibility, and operational excellence, and productivity, and best practices covering everything from the OpenEdge GUI for .NET to the latest Sonic capabilities, to newest capabilities in the ABL and the database, to how to build an application for SaaS.
And these sessions, won’t be presented just by Progress employees.There are plenty of customer success stories, so you can hear 1st hand, how OpenEdge and other Progress products are being used to provide real business value.
Now we know that one of the things that Exchange attendees really like about Exchange, is the ability to network with other members of the Progress community, to share ideas and approaches to solving real problems, and just because this is an online event doesn’t mean no networking.
One of the key features of this event will be the ability to network and chat with other attendees through scheduled chat sessions on specific topics as well as adhoc chat sessions that you can set up with other attendees to the conference.
So head on over to the Exchange Online 2009 site, and register, and check back often so you have the latest information about what is certain to be one very compelling event.
