Press Coverage

What is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to mimic human conversation either through text or audio. It's usually deployed in customer services guises, typically as an online assistant for shopping, but its an area of technology that is rapidly growing and its capabilities are becoming more and more intelligent.

Progress Open Sources ABL Code in Spark Toolkit

New England headquartered application development company Progress is flexing its programmer credentials this month.

The Massachusetts-HQ’d firm has now come forward with its Progress Spark Toolkit… but what is it?

The Progress Spark Toolkit is a set of open source ABL code combined with some recommended best-practices.

Digital Marketing Partnerships Key to Vendors' Channel Strategies

Digital marketing organizations were among the earliest firms to recognize the IT budgets for marketing shifting from the purview of customers' IT departments to marketing executives. Vendors took note of the agencies' influence and unique reach within customer organizations. While on the surface, digital marketing agencies didn't appear to be direct competition for traditional channel partners, some industry watchers asserted the agencies did in fact pose a potential threat. For example, agencies working on digital initiatives with a client's marketing department could hypothetically annex the client's infrastructure decisions, cutting channel partners out from those deals.

Progress Launches Spark Toolkit for Modernizing Legacy Apps

Progress has released Progress Spark Toolkit, a set of open source ABL code and best practices designed to enable organizations to evolve their existing applications and capabilities to meet market demands.

Learning Not to Hate Chatbots

 You can’t interact with LinkedIn without seeing tips and tricks being touted from every direction.

For a while it looked like chatbots could help with this. They offer the means to free up human resources which saves time and money, they can be deployed easily and scaled up accordingly during times of demand, and they can answer simple requests which are below the skill level of human operators.

The only problem with chatbots is that they are terrible.

Progress Sitefinity Customers on Cloud & B2B Online Experience

While attending my first ever ProgressNEXT 2018 event was nothing short of exciting, I was able to gain greater insight on Progress Sitefinity by getting a better understanding of how customers are using their platform. Laura and I gathered four informative interviews below which I’m excited to share with our CMS-Connected audience.

To kick things off, Laura sat down with Ramiro Millan, Head of Accedia’s North American Operations, to discuss their relationship with Progress Sitefinity, how to prepare your customers for the cloud and some of the biggest challenges businesses are facing.

Rethinking the Way You Build Software with Serverless

The way software is built is constantly changing to meet the ongoing pressure of getting to the market faster and keeping up with the competition. The software development industry has gone from waterfall to Agile, from agile to DevOps, from DevOps to DevSecOps, and from monolithic applications to microservices and containers. Today, a new approach is entering the arena and shifting the paradigm yet again. Serverless aims to capitalize on the need for velocity by taking the operational work out.

Low-Code/No-Code? HPaPaaS? Here's What Everybody Is Missing

The burgeoning low-code/no-code market is exploding with innovation, driving unprecedented value for customers while confusing industry analysts.

Gartner clings to its incoherent ‘High Productivity Application Platform-as-a-Service’ categorization, dumping the impossible-to-type HPaPaaS abbreviation onto the market like an elephant sitting on a flower. Yes, we pronounce that huh-PAP-ass.

Progress VP: How to Shine a Light on Dark Data

There’s a lot of data out there and it comes in various different forms.

TechTarget defines dark data is digital information that is not being used.

Magical analyst Gartner Inc. describes dark data as, “Information assets that an organisation collects, processes and stores in the course of its regular business activity, but generally fails to use for other purposes.”

Plan Your Mobile Cross-platform App Development Process

There are a variety of benefits of mobile cross-platform app development. Organizations can create two separate apps for Android and iOS or use a cross-platform framework to ensure that an app is compatible with any device.

Cross-platform development can decrease the cost of app development by saving time and resources, and it does not require developers to specialize in both Android and iOS development.

How Chatbots Can Enhance the Customer Experience

Companies are leaning on technologies like never before – to boost operational efficiencies, enhance innovation and reduce their environmental impact. But, until recently, there wasn’t much thought given to how technology can transform a company's customer service and the overall customer experience (CX). 

Enlighten Designs Enhances Digital Experience for 20,000 Students at Wintec

Enlighten Designs has deployed a web content management system to overhaul the digital capabilities of the Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec), in a move impacting more than 20,000 students.

The Hamilton-headquartered specialists joined forces with Progress, a provider of application development and digital technologies, while also leveraging Microsoft solutions.

Wintec Turns Website into Central Communication Hub

As geographical barriers to education have come down through flexible online learning options, higher education has become extremely competitive.

With campuses in New Zealand and China and 20,000 students from 60 countries, The Waikato Institute of Technology (Wintec), needed an engaging and immersive user experience to capture student interest - from enrolment through graduation. 

Best Front-End Development Tools In 2018

This year is already buzzing with new updates and launches, and being in a tech domain, frontend development has attained unprecedented heights. With the evolution of the web technologies over the years, frontend development tools have also mushroomed nicely.

From Words to Action: Implementing AI

Artificial intelligence is a theme that has dominated the world of technology for some time now, and it looks like it will continue to do so through the near future. From conversational chatbots to predictive maintenance for machines, AI has quickly gone from being a mere competitive advantage to being a business necessity. It doesn’t come as a massive surprise, then, that Gartner has predicted that AI technologies will be in almost every software product by as soon as 2020.

How Smarter Robots Will Disrupt Logistics

Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence continue to drive the industry, but nowhere is this more evident than in today’s modern supply chain. With speed and efficiency improvements, these technologies are reshaping the future of logistics in all facets of the global supply chain

Progress & Ucommerce: Bringing Content and Commerce Together

For us here at CMS-Connected, new strategic partnerships and opportunities are really exciting for us, especially when we hear about them first-hand and can give our wonderful viewers exclusive intel.

With that being said, when we attended the ProgressNEXT 2018 event in Boston from May 29 – June 1st of this year, we were excited to hear about the new partnershipbetween Progress Software and Ucommerce, a fully featured .NET based eCommerce platform.

Automation Tools Promise to Accelerate Machine Learning

Dreaming up obscure insults might be a good way to pass the time in a bar, but it’s a strange day job. Nonetheless, it’s a serious business if you are trying to train a machine to spot unacceptable online behaviour. Data scientists not only need to provide training data; they also need to describe which language is likely to offend within that data. The process, known as annotation, is just one of the laborious tasks data scientists face that IT firms are promising to make easier with automation. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM are offering a raft of technologies to automate machine learning processes (see box). But smaller firms are providing more niche technologies.

Building a Mobile Healthcare App Without Breaking the Bank

However, with digital transformation driving massive innovation in other industries, healthcare organizations have realized they need to embrace new technologies and tools to deliver a better, more engaging experience to patients.

Industry Spotlight: Web Development Tools, Frameworks Evolve Quickly

Changes in technology have led to changes in how web applications are created. And that has caused some consternation among web developers.

A decade ago, the development choice was to use .NET or Java, which meant WPF or ASP.NET for Microsoft developers. Java has been a bread-and-butter language for a long time, so that’s a safe bet. And Microsoft was known for 10-plus years of support for technologies, and even when they changed, the company always made sure everything was backward-compatible. So that was also seen as a safe bet.