Exchange Online Day 3 Recap

Today marked the third and final day of the live portion of the Progress Exchange 2010 Online Conference.  I was quite pleased with the content as well the attendance, and want to thank all of the attendees that joined us from around the world.  We’ve heard some great feedback about the content that was provided by Progress and our global OpenEdge community.

Today’s focus surrounded how attendees could future-proof their applications. We heard from long time Progress community member, Thomas Mercer-Hursh from Computing Integrity Inc., who explained the when, why and how of object orientation. We also heard some best practices for developing an application for several platforms. This taught attendees how to create a single-user display for multiple platforms, such as iPads, remote users, as well as desktops. Finally, we learned about new web-based technologies, including the latest from Microsoft Silverlight.

Another theme today was managing and deploying applications in the cloud. Progress’s Brian Bowman explained how we could work the cloud for operational recovery. This includes supporting and managing the service levels of your customers. Additionally, we heard about Progress Sonic, and how attendees can use this tool to stay on top of integration requirements as they look to deliver their applications as a service.  Sonic will be part of our cloud-enablement services included in Arcade as announced earlier in the conference.

To wrap up the conference, two Progress partners provided us with case studies. The IFDS Group shared with us how they were able to modernize their application to achieve high performance as a service provider. Additionally, we heard from Paul Hernandez-Cuebas about the VictualNet SaaS journey over the past few years, including lessons learned and best practices.

What a great end to a great conference. Again, I want to thank all of the wonderful attendees and speakers from the Progress community around the world. We hope you can join us for the conference again next year and who knows – maybe it is time to bring back the “in-person” conference of the old days.  We will keep you posted, but in the meantime, if you attended please be sure to fill out the conference survey and provide us with your feedback.