View from the Edge

Canada Tech Peaks and PUG Meeting

My journey to Canada began with a flight from Manchester New Hampshire to Toronto on a sunny and mild Tuesday afternoon. I was thinking how convenient it was to fly from my home airport rather than having to take the drive and fight the traffic around Boston. The plot thickened when I was led out onto the tarmac to board a twin-propeller plane that holds somewhere around 20 passengers. I especially enjoyed the baggage handler on the ground, who, once everyone was on the plane, boarded, took off their reflective vest, closed the cabin door, and took their seat as the co-pilot for the flight! With good weather on our side, the flight was smooth and uneventful.   

The turnout for the Tech Peaks meeting on Wednesday morning was excellent- around 25 or so attended. By a show of hands, many turned out to be long-time Progress customers, some for over 20 years. My presentation topic was the OpenEdge Strategy and Roadmap, and among other things, helped the audience understand why Software as a Service is something that will likely have an impact on their business over the next few years, if it hasn't already. The audience was most engaged in dialog on the upcoming Transparent Data Encryption for 10.2B, and the future OE11 multi-tenant table support. I was followed by Frank da Costa who gave an excellent presentation and demonstration of Actional monitoring an OpenEdge environment, a new capability for 10.2B. The audience gained an appreciation for how easy and fast it is, without having to do any coding changes, for Actional to automatically build a map of the transaction flows through the system, the level of detail that is available from the console, and the ease that rules can be established to, in real time, monitor and alert on things like Service Level Agreements.

Almost forgot to mention that the hotel conference room looked out on 2 sides to an indoor shopping mall. I especially enjoyed the people who stopped to stare in the window to see what was going on- maybe new potential cutomers! While this wasn't an actual photo from the event, there was a small boy around 3-4 years old that did spend a minute with us looking in.

My second stop was in Montreal for a Thursday afternoon Progress User Group (PUG) meeting. The attendance here was also good- in the 20's, and the presentation topics were the same. I was taken slightly by surprise when the PUG President opened the meeting speaking in French, with the follow on topic on the Progress corporate overview also delivered in French. It was interesting to try and follow along, but the jokes went right over my head.

I was pleased to see that many in attendance had already made the move to OpenEdge 10.2A, taking advantage of the latest features that we have to offer. With 10.2B coming out soon, and planning underway for a major new OE11 release, anyone who currently finds themselves working with an older version of Progress/OpenEdge should take a look to see what new features they could be using to improve their business, and how they can get up-to-date. Progress Communities is always a great resource for information.

Thanks to all who coordinated and supported these events- it's easy to overlook the work done behind the scenes to make these events both possible and successful.

In case you missed the UK PUG meeting......

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! 

OpenEdge Architect: Why Not?

I met with some of the members of the New England PUG (Progress User Group) today.  We talked about several things and asked them many questions.  Among those questions were these:
    1) Are you using OpenEdge Architect today?
    2) If not, why not?

There were not many using the product (I remember one hand going up), and there were several reasons why not.  In general, there seemed to be a fear to give up the development tool they were currently using.  Fair enough.  When I get my hands on any tool that I really like and am comfortable with I tend to keep it.  And I'm pretty hesitant to have anyone take it from me.

So here's a few questions that I want you to weigh in on:

1. The same questions that I asked the NE PUG?  Are you using OpenEdge Architect today and if not why not?
2. Assuming you are not, what would it take to introduce you to the tool and get you using it?  Is it a case of not wanting to give up the old tool to get the new?  Are you worried about it being as good as your existing tool?  Compatibility issues? 

To burn off the stress of being in the software industry, I turn perfectly good pieces of wood into useless sawdust.  OK, on a good day that's called "woodworking".  Over the years, I've learned both the comfort of an old, familiar tool and the joy of finding things that I can do with new tools.   It's no different with software tools.  We  want you to be  comfortable and confident with your tools, but we also want to introduce you to new capabilities and methodologies.

So tell us what it would take to move you from your current tools to OpenEdge Architect.  We've got a big new release coming up in 2008 and OpenEdge Architect will be an integral part of the capabilities in that release.  So let's do some work now to get ready together.