PROGRESS SOFTWARE EDUCATION NEWSLETTER
January 2012
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- Welcome, from Knowledge Services Director Don Fournier
- New Course Available: Progress Savvion BPM Portal for End Users, by Dipankar Sarkar
- New Course Available: Progress RPM 2.0 Integration for Developers, by Elaine Rosenberg
- New Course Available: Integrating Data with Progress DataXtend SI, by Lauren Slater
- New Course Available: Developing a Progress Apama EPL 4.3.2 Application II, by Melissa Spurr
- New Course Available: Progress Savvion Process Modeling, by Peter Tran
- Updated Courses Available: Progress Sonic ESB 8.5, by Kashif Khan and Dinesh Sharma
- New courses for Progress Control Tower 2.0 and Progress Analyst Studio 2.0, by Arjun Sengupta
Welcome from Don Fournier, Director of Knowledge Services
Happy New Year! Just after the holidays and in their spirit, Progress Software Knowledge Services has a basketful of Education presents for you, our valuable customers. Notably, we have delivered twenty-five new Role-Based Learning Paths (RBLPs) across multiple products and product suites: Actional, Apama, DXSI, PCT, RPM, Savvion, and Sonic. These RBLPs cover six main roles: Business Analyst, Business User, Solution Architect, Solution Developer, Integration Developer, and Solution Administrator. An RBLP is a course or set of courses, along with Assessment Exams, that form a unit of learning taken in a sequence by a customer/learner in a specific role to acquire and test knowledge about a PSC product, product suite, or solution. Please see the following link to explore the tremendous value of these new learning tools. http://www.progress.com/en/education/role-based-training.html
We welcome any feedback you wish to provide. We want especially to know how successful the RBLPs are at making you more proficient with Progress technologies.
Complementary to the new RBLPs and serving as building blocks within many of them are a host of new courses we have delivered across our many products. Our Curriculum Leaders and course developers are among the best in the business, so please take the opportunity to read the following assorted articles about fifteen new or revised courses that our team has produced recently.
Don Fournier
New Course Available: Progress Savvion BPM Portal for End Users
by Dipankar Sarkar
Progress Savvion BusinessManager is a Business Process Management System (BPMS) used for building and managing business process applications. It automates business processes, provides access to resources, and facilitates the exchange of information among employees, customers, partners, and IT systems. People who use the Progress Savvion BusinessManager for accomplishing tasks in specific business processes access it from the Progress Savvion BPM Portal and include the end users, business process managers, and administrators. The Savvion BPM Portal has three modules:
- Home
- Management
- Administration
The end user performs the day-to-day activities of a business process and uses the Progress Savvion BusinessManager Portal Home module.
Course content
The course Progress Savvion BPM Portal for End Users has been developed for the Progress Savvion BusinessManager 7.6.2 release. This course introduces the Progress Savvion BPM Portal to the end users and shows how to use the Progress Savvion BPM Portal Home module to create instances of business process applications and perform business tasks.
The course has three lessons:
|
Lesson |
Title |
Coverage |
|
1 |
Introduction to Savvion BPM Portal Home module |
Introduces business process management (BPM) and business process management systems (BPMS); BPM Portal Home module; creating an instance of a business process application. |
|
2 |
Monitoring and Working on Tasks |
How to work on business process tasks assigned or delegated to the end user; how to re-assign tasks and how to collaborate with others on tasks; how to view alerts; how to monitor business process instances; how to use dashboard to monitor work. |
|
3 |
Specifying your Preferences |
How to use the Preference tab in the Progress Savvion BPM Portal Home module to create and save search filters; delegate tasks. |
Intended audience
This course is for end users responsible for performing day-to-day activities of the business processes in their organizations.
Course delivery formats
The Progress eLearning Community offers this course in the following formats:
You can request for the 2-hour instructor-led training class to be conducted by a Progress consultant at your location. Please contact your regional training coordinator for more information.
Dipankar Sarkar is Senior Instructional Designer with Progress Software Corporation.
New Course Available: Progress® RPM™ 2.0 Integration for Developers
by Elaine Rosenberg
The Progress® RPM™ suite comprises a number of Progress products that empower enterprises to manage their applications efficiently. As the needs of your enterprise change, RPM can be used to adapt to these changes and help you monitor and measure the performance of your business outcomes. Each of the Progress products (Progress® Actional, Progress® Apama, Progress® Control Tower, and Progress® Savvion) that are part of Progress® RPMTM suite has functionality that can help you manage and improve business outcomes.
Course content
This course teaches you the benefits of Actional, Apama, and Savvion that are part of the Progress® RPM™ suite and how the products work together to achieve Responsive Process Management (RPM). The course focuses on the integration between product pairs, why you would use them, and how to configure the products to work together.
This course has the following lessons:
|
Lesson |
Title |
Description |
|
1 |
Overview of Responsive Process Management |
What the Progress® RPM™ (Responsive Process Management) suite is and what the benefits of using RPM for an enterprise are; the products included in the Progress RPM suite and how they work together to provide operational responsiveness for your enterprise. |
|
2 |
Understanding RPM Integration Architecture |
The integration channels between Actional, Apama, and Savvion; introduction to training application for this course; running the initial Savvion process in your training environment. |
|
3 |
Configuring RPM Integration Channels |
Introduction to the RPM integration channels by product pairs—Actional-Savvion, Actional-Apama, and Apama-Savvion; how messages flow between products for each product pair; what you need to do to set up the integration channels. |
|
4 |
Monitoring Savvion with Actional |
How to configure Actional and Savvion for the Savvion-to-Actional channel; use the Actional interceptor functionality to monitor the progress of a Savvion process instance and obtain information about the worksteps and dataslots of a process instance |
|
5 |
Sending Alerts to Savvion BusinessManager from Actional and Apama |
Configure Actional and Apama to send Alerts to Savvion BusinessManager. |
|
6 |
Accessing Savvion Processes from Actional |
Use the Actional-to-Savvion channel for creating process instances, updating dataslots in a process instance and accessing a workstep of a process instance in Savvion BusinessManager. |
|
7 |
Accessing Savvion Processes from Apama |
Use the Apama-to-Savvion channel for creating process instances, updating dataslots in a process instance and accessing a workstep of a process instance in Savvion BusinessManager. |
|
8 |
Sending Events from Actional to Apama |
Introduction to transaction summary events and how they can be used to send messages from Actional to Apama; creating a policy in Actional which sends a transaction summary to Apama; developing an Apama application that processes incoming transaction summary events. |
|
9 |
Sending Savvion Events to Apama |
Using the Savvion-to-Apama integration channel to send events from Savvion to Apama during a workstep of a Savvion process instance |
Intended audience
The course is designed for those who are interested in the integration of a single pair of Progress products. They can take the relevant lessons for the product pair they must learn to integrate.
Course delivery formats
The Progress eLearning Community offers this course in the following formats:
You can request for the 2. 5-day instructor-led training class to be conducted by a Progress consultant at your location. Please contact your regional training coordinator for more information.
Elaine Rosenberg is Principal Course Developer with Progress Software Corporation.
New Course Available: Integrating Data with Progress DataXtend SI
By Lauren Slater
Many organizations are adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA) to integrate software applications because SOA provides a loosely coupled, standards-based architecture, which lets different applications interact with each other—without having to rely on a specific software platform or language. Progress® Sonic ESB® provides flexible integration and reuse of business applications within an SOA. It connects, mediates and orchestrates services wherever they are deployed. Sonic ESB eliminates brittle point-to-point integration and provides a robust, event-driven architecture that can evolve, scale and extend throughout the enterprise.
Each software system, however, has its own way of representing data. Identifying and maintaining semantic mapping between systems can require tremendous effort. Even in SOA environments, mapping and validating data between applications is still largely done using custom code and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT), which is often complex. These result in tightly coupled, point-to-point data integration, even when the business logic is loosely coupled. One of the most expensive and complex challenges of integrating business applications is ensuring the validity of data exchanged between applications while maintaining the loose coupling achieved by SOA.
This is where Progress® DataXtend® Semantic Integrator (SI) helps. DataXtend SI uses common model integration to relate applications that interact with each other. With this approach to data integration, all systems map to a single data model instead of directly to each other. DataXtend SI addresses semantic data integration by letting you specify rules based on the meaning of data and your business requirements.
Using DataXtend SI data services in Sonic ESB, you gain the benefits of both products. Data services become part of a scalable, distributed set of continuously available, orchestrated services you can centrally manage using Sonic’s management tools. Common model-based data services in ESB process itineraries provide loose coupling of data transformation, validation, and aggregation, and you can use DataXtend SI’s change management tools to track and manage changes to them through the lifecycle of an integration project.
A data service in an ESB process can be either a transformation data service or a semantic mediation data service. A transformation data service is a model-driven replacement for an XSLT transformation step in an ESB process. A semantic mediation data service performs transformation, validation, enrichment, sequencing, and merging of data in an ESB process.
Course content
The course Integrating DataXtend SI with Sonic ESB is for developers whose projects use Sonic ESB to integrate business applications and services and use DataXtend SI data services to perform data integration in Sonic ESB processes. This course presents how to use the two products together.
This course has the following lessons:
|
Lesson |
Title |
What it covers |
|
1 |
Using Data Services in Sonic ESB |
Presents the benefits of the integration, developer roles, and tasks to perform the integration. Introduces the sample integration projects used in the hands-on exercises. |
|
2 |
Preparing Data Services for Deployment in Sonic ESB |
Presents how to configure Sonic ESB data sources, define fault types for data services that can be handled by Sonic ESB fault handlers, and package data services for deployment in Sonic ESB. |
|
3 |
Adding a Data Service to a Sonic ESB Process |
Presents how to upload data services to the Sonic Domain, add a transformation data service to an ESB process itinerary, and define request and response mappings for a data service step. |
|
4 |
Using Semantic Mediation Data Services |
Presents how to create a standalone semantic mediation data service, how to handle DataXtend SI data service faults in Sonic ESB, and how to test a multi-process Sonic ESB project and examine intermediate results of the test execution. |
Intended audience
This course is for developers who use Sonic ESB to implement service-oriented application integration and use DataXtend SI to implement data integration.
The Progress eLearning Community offers this course in the following formats:
The 1-day instructor-led training is conducted at your location by a Progress Software Corporation consultant.
Lauren Slater is a Principal Course Developer and Instructor with Progress Software Corporation
New Course Available: Developing a Progress Apama EPL 4.3.2 Application II
By Melissa Spurr
Course content
- Apply alternative programming techniques using event actions and action-type variables
- Implement parallel processing
- Share, expose, and persist data
- Generate documentation for your application
- Find errors in your application
When you complete this course, you should be able to:
- Implement alternative ways of using events and actions
- Use events to control processing
- Use an event as an interface
- Use event actions
- Create callbacks and closures
- Implement contexts and parallel processing
- Share, expose, and persist application data
- Generate documentation about the structure of an application
- Find errors in an Apama EPL application
- View and interpret correlator output
- Request information from the correlator
- Use log statements
- Write echo monitors
- Debug an application
- Profile an application
This course has five lessons:
|
Lesson |
Title |
Description |
|
1 |
Additional Ways to Use Events and Actions |
Using event actions and action-type variables, including callbacks and closures. |
|
2 |
Implementing Parallel Processing |
Improving the performance of your EPL application by using multiple contexts to implement parallel processing. |
|
3 |
Sharing, Exposing, and Persisting Data |
Using the MemoryStore plug-in to:
|
|
4 |
Creating Documentation for Your Application |
Adding annotations to your EPL source code. Using the Apama Doc tool to generate documentation about your application's generated source code. |
|
5 |
Finding Errors in Your Application |
Finding and fixing runtime errors and memory leaks. Includes information about using the Apama Studio Debugging and Profiling tools. |
Intended audience
The primary audience is software developers who have taken the Developing a Progress Apama EPL 4.3.2 Application I course and who want to learn additional programming techniques.
Course delivery format
The Progress eLearning Community offers this course in the following formats:
You can request for the 1.25-day instructor-led training class to be conducted by a Progress Sonic consultant at your location. Please contact your regional training coordinator for more information.
Melissa Spurr is Principal Course Developer with Progress Software Corporation.
New Course Available: Progress Savvion Process Modeling
By Peter Tran
Business processes represent the lifeblood of every organization. Every business has some well-defined processes that govern how it operates, how it serves its customers, and how it maximizes profit. Efficient business processes are key strategic assets that give an organization its competitive advantage and enable it to stay ahead of its competitors. In today’s turbulent business environment, business process management (BPM) is critical to your organization’s success.
Progress Savvion Process Modeler is a BPM tool that enables business analysts to articulate and capture their organization’s business processes. To help you make the most of this tool, Progress Education is offering a new training course, Progress Savvion Process Modeling.
Course Content
This course features practical examples, step-by-step demonstrations, task-based procedures, best practices, and hands-on exercises designed to help you master the foundational concepts, tools and techniques of business process modeling.
The course consists of the following twelve lessons:
|
Lesson |
Title |
What it covers |
|
1 |
Introduction to Business Process Management using Savvion |
Business process management, business process management systems, Progress Savvion BusinessManager, and Savvion business process application lifecycle. |
|
2 |
Introduction to Process Modeling |
Business Process Modeling Notation, process modeling elements, and an example of how to identify process modeling elements in a business process. |
|
3 |
Exploring Progress Savvion Process Modeler |
Features and functions of Process Modeler, three ways of modeling business processes, components of the Process Modeler perspective, and how to explore a sample business process. |
|
4 |
Defining a Business Process |
How to define global users and groups, create a new project, and define swim lanes, worksteps, and uncontrolled sequence flow for a business process. |
|
5 |
Defining Dataslots |
How to define and assign user dataslots to worksteps of a business process to enable information flow, and how to reuse user dataslots defined in one business process in other processes. |
|
6 |
Defining Gateways, Links, and Phases |
How to define gateways and links to enable routing logic for a business process, and how to define phases to mark stages of the process. |
|
7 |
Defining Alerts and Adapters |
How to define alerts and assign them to worksteps of a business process, and how to assign managed adapters to worksteps. |
|
8 |
Documenting a Business Process |
How to document a business process using annotation elements and the process summary document. |
|
9 |
Simulating a Business Process |
How to create a simulation project for a business process, define simulation scenarios for the project, run simulation scenarios, and generate and view simulation reports. |
|
10 |
Defining a Business Process using the Tabular Tab |
An alternative way of defining a business process model using the Tabular tab of Process Modeler. |
|
11 |
Defining Forms |
How to customize forms for worksteps of a business process, save a customized form to the Process Repository, and use an existing form as a template. |
|
12 |
Sharing a Business Process |
How to validate a business process, share a business process with others within your organization, and share a business process as a presentation. |
Intended Audience
This course is designed for business analysts responsible for modeling their organization’s business processes.
Course delivery format
The Progress eLearning Community offers this course in the following formats:
The 3-day instructor-led training is conducted at your location by a Progress Software Corporation consultant.
Peter Tran is a Principal Course Developer with Progress Software Corporation.
Update Courses Available: Progress Sonic ESB 8.5
By Kashif Khan and Dinesh Sharma
Progress® Sonic® ESB is a messaging-based Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that enables enterprises to integrate and reuse business applications. Progress Sonic ESB advances enterprise integration to the state of the art by bringing you the power and flexibility of an open services and integration standards model with unmatched, dynamic, multisite operations management and deployment capabilities—backed by 100 percent uptime-messaging infrastructure.
The newly released Progress Sonic ESB 8.5 provides:
- Better integration with Progress Actional by providing support for auditing multi-part messages and monitoring Sonic Connect service deployments
- Improved message mapping with the capability to access and modify runtime parameters of a service
- One Progress Development Tooling to provide a unified user experience across multiple Progress Software products
Overview of courses
To incorporate the new features of Progress Sonic ESB 8.5 into the available training, courses for Sonic ESB integration developers, Sonic ESB solution administrators, and Sonic solution architects have been modified.
The Sonic ESB courses that are now available for version 8.5 are:
|
Title |
Description |
Audience |
|
Progress Sonic ESB Overview 8.5 |
This course provides an overview of Sonic ESB, with some references to the concepts of service-oriented architecture (SOA), event-driven architecture (EDA), and resource-oriented architecture (ROA). The course also covers the architectural components of Sonic ESB and their inter-relation in the Sonic Domain. In addition, the course describes the Sonic ESB products and tools that enable development, configuration, integration, and deployment of services, and applications exposed as services. |
|
|
Introduction to Progress Sonic Workbench 8.5 |
This course covers the basic tasks an application developer performs in Progress Sonic ESB Workbench—develop Sonic applications, create projects and artifacts, modify artifacts, test artifacts, and manage services and containers. |
|
|
Developing Sonic ESB Processes 8.5 |
This course teaches how to develop Sonic ESB applications using Sonic Workbench. The course covers how to create a Sonic ESB process, and how to add and configure steps. It also covers how to configure message mappings for steps in an ESB process. In addition, it describes how to develop fault handlers for ESB processes. The course also discusses how to debug an ESB process. |
|
|
Using Web Services with Sonic Connect 8.5 |
This course teaches how to develop and invoke Web services in the Sonic Workbench development environment using the Sonic Connect service. The course covers how to work with SOAP-based as well as RESTful Web services. In addition, the course teaches how to host and invoke JAX-WS and JAX-RS POJOs as Web service using Sonic Workbench. |
|
|
Writing Custom Services 8.5 |
This course teaches how to develop a custom ESB service using Sonic Workbench, demonstrates how to create and test a new ESB service by defining a Java Service Type, and familiarizes students with the some of the key Sonic ESB application programming interfaces (API) that are used to implement service logic and manage lifecycle operations of a custom ESB service. |
|
|
Progress Sonic ESB System Deployment |
This course covers the concepts, procedures, tools, and best practices used to extract composite applications from a development environment and to deploy them on the ESB in user-acceptance testing and production environments. |
|
|
Using Sonic Deployment Manager to Deploy Sonic 8.5 |
This course introduces Progress Sonic Deployment Manager (SDM) and covers major features such as SDM’s model-driven architecture, the different modes for running an SDM model, and naming conventions. |
|
|
Using Actional to Monitor and Manage Sonic 8.5 |
The course teaches how to use Actional to monitor and manage a running Sonic environment. It introduces the components of Sonic and Actional and shows how Sonic components map to the Actional architecture. It also teaches how to install Actional components such as Actional Management Server and Actional Agent in target locations, the various steps required to integrate Actional with Sonic, and how Actional can be used in monitoring and managing service traffic in Sonic. In addition, the course covers how to configure aspect-oriented programming (AOP) interceptors for greater visibility into Sonic Connect deployments. |
|
Course delivery formats:
The Progress eLearning Community offers this course in the following formats:
You can request for instructor-led training classes to be conducted by a Progress Sonic consultant at your location. Please contact your regional training coordinator for more information.
Kashif Khan is Lead Principal Instructional Designer and Dinesh Sharma is Instructional Designer with Progress Software Corporation.
New courses for Progress Control Tower™ 2.0 and Progress® Analyst Studio™ 2.0
By Arjun Sengupta
The Progress® Responsive Process Management (RPM) suite enables enterprises to achieve the highest level of business efficiency. It blends the capabilities of three key Progress Software products:
- Progress® Apama®, which provides real-time visibility of business events.
- Progress® Actional®, which allows enterprises to monitor and manage business transactions.
- Progress® Savvion®, which enables enterprises to model, automate, and manage business processes.
In addition, the RPM suite comprises two tools that empower business users and business analysts to view and analyze data acquired from multiple sources in an RPM-enabled business environment:
- Progress Control Tower™ (PCT), which provides a unified, browser-based view of an RPM-enabled business environment, drawing information from Apama, Actional, and Savvion, and from other sources over the web, and displays the information in portlets on a web page.
- Progress® Analyst Studio™(PAS), which provides business analysts the capability to combine data drawn from different sources into rich, interactive graphs and charts.
To address the training needs of enterprises that use PCT and PAS with an RPM-based solution, we launched four courses:
- Installing and Configuring Progress Control Tower 2.0
- Navigating and Using Progress Control Tower 2.0
- Adding RPM Components to Progress Control Tower 2.0
- Using Progress Analyst Studio 2.0
A brief description of these courses is provided here:
|
Course Title |
Description |
|
Installing and Configuring Progress Control Tower |
This course is a part of the RPM Solution Administrator learning path. It introduces Progress Control Tower and teaches how to install PCT, start and stop PCT, and create PCT users. |
|
Navigating and Using Progress Control Tower |
This course is a part of the RPM Business Analyst and RPM Business User learning paths. It introduces PCT and its interface, and shows how to use PCT to manage and monitor an RPM-based business environment. The course demonstrates how to create pages, add portlets from each RPM component, access some default functionality contributed by Actional and Savvion, set up interactions between portlets, and collaborate with other PCT users. |
|
Adding RPM Components to Progress Control Tower |
This course is a part of the RPM Solution Developer and RPM Integration Developer learning paths. It teaches how to add portlets and pages from Actional, dashboards from Apama, and widgets and web pages from Savvion to PCT. |
|
Using Progress Analyst Studio |
This course is a part of the RPM Business Analyst learning path. It shows how to use PAS to extract RPM data and create relevant views with the extracted data. The course also demonstrates how to share customized views with other business users by publishing the views to PCT. |
Course delivery formats:
The Progress eLearning Community offers this course in the following formats:
You can request for the 3-day instructor-led training class to be conducted by a Progress Sonic consultant at your location. Please contact your regional training coordinator for more information.
Arjun Sengupta is Lead Principal Instructional Designer with Progress Software Corporation.
