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Newsletter Archive - April 2009

Table of Contents

1. Welcome, from Knowledge Services Director Don Fournier
2. The OpenEdge® 10 Tour, Evaluation Kit and Tutorial now available, by James Willis
3. Updated course: Active Policy Enforcement with Actional®, by Sai Kumar
4. Introducing DataXtend® SI Training, by Lauren Slater
5. Assessment Exams Now Available from the Progress eLearning Community, by Craig VanDerAa

Welcome from Don Fournier, Director of Knowledge Services

Progress Knowledge Services supports a broad product portfolio with high-quality customer courseware. We are continually adding value to our numerous curricula for you, our customers, throughout a given year by developing new courses and enhancing existing ones. This is a main reason why I urge all of you to subscribe to the constantly refreshed Progress eLearning Community, which you can so easily do by following the link to http://wbt.progress.com/home/.

This edition of the Education Quarterly Newsletter focuses on key Actional, OpenEdge, and DataXtend Semantic Integrator (DXSI) courseware that is new or revised. It also introduces you to a set of critical new deliverables known as Assessments Tests.

To find out about all of the new features of an extensive product like OpenEdge®, you frequently have to navigate a formidable intellectual property set. Where do you start? James Willis, a Principal Course Developer, wants to tell you in our first article. Read his description of the OpenEdge Tour, OpenEdge Evaluation Kit, and the OpenEdge Tutorial, (with a focus on the OpenEdge Architect) for advice on how to proceed. Then, jump right in by taking the OE Tour! Be sure to leave us feedback using the easily located feedback button.

Sai Kumar, a Senior Instructional Designer at Progress Software India, next describes for you the enhancements made to the Active Policy Enforcement (APE) with Actional course. Sai provides details on course content, product compatibility, demos and exercises, audience and formats/delivery vehicles. Don’t miss this article if you are a system administrator using APE to manage, configure, monitor and secure Web Services with the Actional® product.

Lauren Slater, a Senior Course Developer at Progress, has developed a new curriculum to support the DataXtend® SI product. In our third article, we thus leave you in the capable hands of one of our DXSI experts to explain how you can benefit most from two instructor-led training (ILT) courses for DXSI: DataXtend SI Overview and Integrating Data with DataXtend SI.

Finally, Craig VanDerAa, a Principal eLearning Developer, introduces you to Assessment Tests (AEs). Have you ever wanted to test the knowledge you’ve gained from taking one of our courses? See Craig’s article and explore our new AEs.

- Don Fournier

The OpenEdge® 10 Tour, Evaluation Kit and Tutorial Now Available

By James Willis

OpenEdge 10 has introduced hundreds of new and expanded features into the OpenEdge family of products. Whether you are new to OpenEdge or an experienced developer, gathering and sorting through information about all these new features is a daunting task. That is where the OpenEdge 10 Tour, Evaluation Kit and Tutorial can help.

The OpenEdge Tour, Evaluation Kit and Tutorial provide a convenient way for developers to learn and experience the power of OpenEdge 10 technologies.

OpenEdge Tour

The OpenEdge Tour introduces you to the core components of the OpenEdge platform for developing, deploying, integrating and managing mission critical business applications. With this tour you will get a detailed overview of the OpenEdge development environment, enterprise database, application server, business continuity tools, and system management facilities.

The Tour is split among the OpenEdge multiple product and technology areas to make it easy to target the areas in which you are interested. For new customers or existing customers not familiar with the newer products, there is the Introduction to OpenEdge and Introduction to OpenEdge ABL sections of the Tour. These sections introduce the OpenEdge core product and language features.

From there, you can move on to the product and technology area of your choice to learn more about specific OpenEdge 10 features, which include:

OpenEdge 10 New Features

• OpenEdge 10 ABL Features
• ProDataSets™
• Object-Oriented Features
• Other New Features
• OpenEdge 10 Database features

The OpenEdge Architect Product

• Introduction to OpenEdge Architect
• Architect Basics
  • Perspectives and Views
  • Workspaces, Projects, and Resources
• Architect’s ABL Editor
• Architect’s Visual Designer & GUI for .NET
• Architect’s DB Navigator
• Architect’s OpenEdge Debugger
• Architect’s Tools for Business Logic
• Architect’s Meta Catalog

OpenEdge Security & Auditing

• Introduction to Core Services
• Security features
• Auditing features

OpenEdge AppServer and Integration

• Web Services and Open Clients
• Integration Features

OpenEdge Management & High Availability

• IT Operations
• OpenEdge Management
• High Availability in OpenEdge

OpenEdge Tour

For those developers that would like a hands-on experience with the OpenEdge 10 family of products, Progress offers the OpenEdge Evaluation Kit. The OpenEdge Evaluation Kit includes a 60-day trial of the following products:

• OpenEdge Architect
• OpenEdge RDBMS
• OpenEdge Replication
• OpenEdge Management
• OpenEdge Application Server
• Sonic® Workbench

With these free, fully-functional evaluation copies you can test the power of the OpenEdge platform and the ease of managing service-based components with Sonic.

OpenEdge Tutorial

The OpenEdge Tutorial is a companion to both the OpenEdge Tour and Evaluation Kit. The Tutorial takes you through a hands-on step-by-step tour of the Architect development environment. The step-by-step guides included in the Tutorial cover the following areas:

• Setting up and Configuring Architect’s project-based development environment
• Using Architect’s DB Navigator tool to view and modify database schema
• Using the OpenEdge Editor’s code assist features to write ABL application code
• Using Architect’s Debugger to debug ABL applications
• Using the Tools for Business Logic to create ProDataSet and Temp-table models and auto-generating ABL code from them
• Using the Visual Designer to create OpenEdge GUI for .NET application screens

The OpenEdge Tutorial gives developers a great start in learning how to harness the powerful new features of the OpenEdge Architect development environment.

Try It Today!

The OpenEdge 10 Tour, Evaluation Kit and Tutorial are valuable tools for those who want to learn the basics about the OpenEdge 10 family of products. You can access these tools for free from the Progress eLearning Community at: https://wbt.progress.com.

James Willis is a Principal Course Developer with Progress Software

Updated course: Active Policy Enforcement with Actional®

By Sai Kumar

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables architects and developers to define the use cases of an enterprise in terms of services. The providers of the services can be from within or outside of the enterprise. The consumers of the services need not know (or care) what platform or in what programming language the service is running.

Enforcing security and compliance in such a scenario is challenging. An SOA has many more "moving parts" in the form of reusable software components exposed to security and compliance issues than traditional applications. Adding to the challenge is the fact that there are often multiple security standards to mediate and an ever-growing number of regulations to apply to information.

The newly-updated course, Active Policy Enforcement with Actional, teaches you how to use Actional to provide centralized policy management and distributed enforcement. The Actional product empowers security and compliance experts in organizations by allowing them to author policies once and apply those policies consistently across the SOA, thus guaranteeing complete coverage while reducing costs and risks.

In addition, while alternative approaches can only apply policies to services and operations, Actional applies policies to end-to-end processes wherever they flow, allowing processes and services to change without requiring policy or application changes.

Course overview

Updated to support Actional Intermediary 7.2, the course includes new topics which teach you how to use the Intermediary with the Actional Server for reconnecting flows, trust zones and configuration provisioning.

This course also guides you through the installation and set up of the Actional Server and Actional Agent, along with an SOA training environment you use during the course to generate and monitor a variety of service traffic scenarios.

Numerous demonstrations for using Actional Intermediary and Actional Server to perform key configuration tasks are featured in the course. In addition, the course includes many hands-on exercises that you perform in your live version of the Actional product.

The modules in this course include:

This course is for system and security administrators responsible for managing, configuring, monitoring and securing Web Services using Actional Active Policy Enforcement.

Course delivery formats

The course is available as four days of Instructor-led Training . Materials include a course book as well as a CD with example code and lab files with solutions.

For the self-paced learner, the course also is available in the Progress eLearning Community, which can be found at https://wbt.progress.com.

Sai Kumar is a Senior Instructional Designer with Progress Software.

Introducing DataXtend® SI Training

By Lauren Slater

Today’s businesses are moving towards Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), implementing a loosely coupled infrastructure in which IT assets can be quickly and optimally arrayed to support changing business goals. However, many organizations are finding their SOA implementations plagued by the complexity of reconciling differences in the physical data format between applications and services involved in a business process. Traditional point-to-point integration, which uses XSLT stylesheets and/or custom code to transform data from one format to another, becomes overly complex and difficult to manage as the number of applications to integrate grows.

Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator (SI) helps businesses greatly reduce the complexity and cost of data integration throughout the software lifecycle. DataXtend SI implements a common model architecture for data integration, in which each application’s data transforms to and from a single common information model. With DataXtend SI, customers create data services that can be deployed into any Java™ environment to perform semantic data integration.

DataXtend SI Workbench is the design-time tool customers use to create data services. Using the DataXtend SI Workbench, customers can:

• Capture complex transformations between data formats without writing code
• Define semantic routing of information based on business rules
• Aggregate data from multiple sources
• Incrementally test a data service without deploying it
• Determine the impact of potential changes to a data model
• Selectively synchronize the work of multiple developers into one project
• Package and deploy data services for a variety of environments

Progress Knowledge Services has developed two Instructor-led Training courses to help customers get up to speed using DataXtend SI:

• DataXtend SI Overview
• Integrating Data with DataXtend SI

DataXtend SI Overview

This is a two-day course targeted at Enterprise Architects, Data Architects, and Data Analysts who are evaluating the product for potential integration projects. It provides a high-level overview of product features and use cases, as well as enough hands-on labs to get a feel for the development process.

Integrating Data with DataXtend SI

This three-day course is targeted at Developers and Data Analysts who are actively using DataXtend SI for one or more integration projects. It provides more in-depth product details and more extensive hands-on labs than the two-day course.

Both courses use DataXtend SI version 8.3.2. Updated courses for the upcoming 8.4 release are currently under development and are scheduled for release in Summer, 2009.

Contact your regional training coordinator for more information on ordering either of these courses.

Lauren Slater is a Course Developer and Instructor with Progress Software

Assessment Exams Now Available from the Progress eLearning Community

By Craig VanDerAa

Progress Software now offers assessment exams for its newest web-based training courses. When you complete a course, you can take an assessment exam to find out how well you learned the information taught in the course. You can also use an assessment exam beforehand to determine whether you would benefit from taking a course.

Assessment Exams are included with all enrollments to the Progress eLearning Community (PEC) at http://wbt.progress.com. You can enroll in exams from topic-based assessment exam catalogs, or use the link to the related assessment exam from within a course.

Assessment exams are tied to individual courses and consist of a number of multiple choice questions divided into sections which correspond to the lessons. For each question, choose the best answer by selecting the appropriate radio button and then clicking Submit Response. Once a response is submitted it cannot be changed, so take your time and select your answers carefully.

You can take as long as you like to complete an exam, but you must do it in one sitting. If you stop an exam mid-way through, you will have to start over again the next time you access the exam.

When you complete the exam, you will see a summary of your exam results. A score of 70% is considered a passing grade. The results summary breaks down your score by lesson and you can use this information to decide whether you need to go back and review one or more of the lessons.

If you would like to improve your score, you can take the exam again at any time. But, keep in mind that the questions are randomized and selected form a larger pool of questions, so each time you take the exam, the questions will be different.

Your most recent exam score will be stored in your online records.

Craig VanDerAa is a Principle eLearning Developer with Progress Software

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