Exchange 2008 Thank You!!

With Exchange now more than a week behind us and most of us now back are at our “day” jobs, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for a great conference. With over 800 attendees learning and sharing in more than 110 sessions and 3 pre-conference workshops the conference was a resounding success.

However, it wasn’t just the formal part of the conference that you folks came for. There were also numerous networking events including the Sunday evening Poster Fair, and the Expo’s on Monday and Tuesday, where you met with other customers and with Progress employees in a more informal setting, and where you could see demonstrations of the various Progress products as well as products offered by various Progress partners.

One of the areas where there was a lot of interest  was the OpenEdge Advanced GUI, our brand new Microsoft .NET-based UI technology to be released in the fall as part of OpenEdge 10.2A. The morning workshop on the Advanced GUI was extremely well attended, and the afternoon one was sold-out.

Additionally, the 4 breakout sessions on the Advanced GUI were in high demand and I think it is fair to say that the demo performed by Shelley Chase and Peter Judge where they demonstrated some of the more advanced capabilities of the Advanced GUI was one of the highlights of the conference.

But there were many other great sessions during the conference including sessions on the newest capabilities in OpenEdge Architect, ABL object-oriented extensions, database administration, and using OpenEdge Adapter for Sonic ESB native invocation mechanism. This new way of using the adapter really simplifies the development process when using OpenEdge and Sonic together.  There were also session on using AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies with OpenEdge. And, of course, there were a number of sessions which provided you with use cases and deep insight to all of the products that make up the Progress SOA Portfolio.

Certainly, one area that got a lot of attention was the structured error handling sessions where over 200 people attended the 2 sessions that were presented. Both sessions did a great job of showing not only the basic capabilities, but also showed you how you can migrate your existing application to use this new capability in an incremental fashion without breaking your existing code.

And I certainly would be remiss if I didn’t mention one of my own session, the OpenEdge Roadmap and Strategy session that I presented with Salvador Vinals, where over 170 attendees where brought up to date on what are some of the latest capabilities that you can find in OpenEdge, and got some insight into what are some of the things we are planning for a future release.

So if you went to this year’s Exchange, we thank you. If you missed this year’s Exchange, or just want to take another look at the slides for a session you attended, or maybe one you missed, you can find copies of all of the presentations on the Exchange download site or on PSDN. And, checkout the Exchange Virtual Expo,  an on-line version of the exhibit hall where you can get detailed information on all the vendors that demonstrated their products and services at the Expo.

In any case, we look forward to seeing at next year’s Exchange, which will be held in New Orleans. If you have ideas for the kinds of sessions and workshops you would like to see at next year’s conference, please submit them to the Exchange Forum and in the interim, consider attending a regional event especially if you weren’t able to make this year’s Exchange.

PSDN Live will be held in Boston from September 7-9, PTW Asia Pacific will be held in Queensland, Australia from August 17-19, and PTW Mexico will be held October 9th with other regional events still being planned.

Thank you.

Ken