Make the Most of Progress OpenEdge by Identifying Skills Gaps, Tightening Security and Ensuring Database Health

Let Progress OpenEdge experts modernize and secure your critical applications.

How do you get your Progress OpenEdge professionals and systems working at peak efficiency? By clearly understanding the shortcomings and gaps and working to fill them, that’s how!

The OpenEdge development platform offers everything an enterprise needs to craft high-performance, high-throughput transactional applications at scale. Our teams regularly deliver new features and functions that help developers optimize their OpenEdge applications, ultimately improving your business’ overall cost-savings and efficiency.

OpenEdge makes it easy to develop and deliver your business applications, but to do so your systems need to be operating at peak efficiency and your employees need to be equipped with the latest skills. To help you find out if your business is optimized for OpenEdge, the Progress Professional Services team offers a variety of system health checks and employee skill assessments so you can create more revenue opportunities while developing at lower cost and with lower risk.

Systems Health Checks

How do you know if your OpenEdge database and applications are operating at peak performance? With a Progress Services Health Check, that’s how.

A Database Health Check makes sure your systems are running at peak performance. We can also diagnose problems before performance issues affect your users. A database health check performed by a Progress Professional Services expert offers:

• A complete inventory of your systems
• A check of the KPIs that can affect database performance
• Best practices recommendations for maintenance
• Best practices recommendations for performance tuning

Database health checks are useful for any business, but especially for longtime users of OpenEdge who may have acquired technical bloat. Let us show you what you have available, what can be cut back and the improvements you can expect to see with these changes.

Another popular systems health check is the OpenEdge Security Health Check. An application without security can be worse than no application at all. Fortunately, the OpenEdge Security Health Check can make your application as safe as Fort Knox.

“The first step to enhancing the security of your OpenEdge application is recognizing the need to review and audit existing security procedures. The OpenEdge Security Health Check can help you minimize security vulnerabilities that may be identified within your OpenEdge application,” the OpenEdge Security Health Check web pages said.

With security being a top-of-mind issue for most companies, ensuring that your OpenEdge application has the latest security features deployed can be critical to the safety of your entire business. Our OpenEdge Security Health Check assesses and documents the current state of your OpenEdge application and helps you implement any recommended improvements to minimize identified security vulnerabilities. The Health Check helps you have a more secure OpenEdge application and prepares you for future support application extensibility, integration and modernization.

Employee Skills Assessments

The OpenEdge team wants you to get the most out of your applications. That’s why we are applying our expertise from decades, yes decades, of developing OpenEdge and working with thousands of customers to analyze your applications.

That is exactly where the OpenEdge Skills Assessment comes in. Here our Professional Services team compares the skills and processes of your DBAs, architects and developers against those required for cutting-edge modern application development and best practices.

With a skills assessment, we will help you answer questions like:

• Do you have enough programmers to build and maintain your OpenEdge applications?
• Do you have the right kind of developers?
• What are the most important steps to take?

OpenEdge Skills Assessment is a six-step program that identifies your organization’s application development strengths and details the areas that need work. By analyzing your team’s development processes and how it uses OpenEdge, you have a starting point and plan for improvement. We then work together to craft a learning path for team members and the team, allowing all to polish their existing OpenEdge skills while building new ones.

Suggested training classes may include:

• ABL Performance Tuning
• Progress Application Server for OpenEdge Administrators
• Advanced Object Oriented Programming
• OpenEdge Security
• Using ProDataSets

The result of taking these steps is a skills improvement process that is both consistent and measurable.

Why It’s Important

COA is the Dutch central body responsible for sheltering asylum seekers. With such a critical service and ever-growing demands, COA decided to take a close look at how it handles its custom-built applications.

COA’s software development manager Michiel Bennebroek led the charge in rethinking how his organization uses OpenEdge.

“We were keeping up with the standard development within OpenEdge, which is good for maintenance,” Bennebroek said. “But to realize our ambition, we needed to do more. We wanted to move to a web services architecture approach that streamlines operations and frees up resources for innovation.”

Bennebroek took the logical step and went with an OpenEdge Skills Assessment offering from the Progress Services Team.

Progress Professional Services consultants worked closely with the three internal developers and five external programmers that comprise COA’s development team.

“Working with the Professional Services team on the skills assessment was natural and seamless,” Bennebroek explained. “I work closely with my Progress account management team, so they knew exactly what I was trying to achieve. Progress then did all the work based around my ambitions, they built the assessment, did the interviews, and gave me the report, it didn’t cost me any time or effort.”

COA programmers loved the training, describing it as both helpful and informative. “I recommend the Skills Assessment to everyone, it’s a must-have if you don’t want to lose focus on achieving your ambitions,” Bennebroek concluded.

Why Choose Progress Professional Services

In addition to the story of COA, we regularly survey our customers to be sure that our services are delivering the value they expect.

In a recent TechValidate survey of Progress Professional Services customers, 100% said they saw a return on their investment one year after engaging with our team. An engineer from our partner QAD, Inc. said in the same survey that they were able to increase the productivity of their staff by between 75% and 100% after working with our team.

OpenEdge health checks and skills assessments help you get ready for new application developments and modernization projects and grow the careers of your people. Reach out to us to discuss which health checks and skills assessments are right for your business.

Talk to Us