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 customers! 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.