Progress OpenEdge 12.8 brings the latest and greatest range of features to boost developer productivity in 12.8. This blog post explores how these features enable developers to create applications more efficiently while reducing development costs.
OpenEdge 12.8 integrates OpenTelemetry, a powerful observability framework, to provide developers with deep insights into application performance. OpenTelemetry tracing allows developers to identify code bottlenecks and optimize application performance by visualizing ABL-specific performance data. The support for OpenTelemetry metrics will enable developers to configure, view and analyze trace data for ABL Procedures, Classes and Transactions while facilitating performance tuning of the OpenEdge database and PAS for OpenEdge servers. This helps business applications operate more smoothly and efficiently.
OpenEdge 12.8 includes native support for Object-Oriented Advanced Business Language (OOABL) collections such as List, SortedSet and HashMap. By leveraging these built-in collections, developers can benefit from improved performance as they are implemented using native C code. Additionally, developers can overcome the size limitations of ABL's array support, leading to more efficient application development and optimized resource utilization.
This release significantly enhances the Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge (PDSOE), the integrated development environment (IDE) for OpenEdge applications. These improvements include:
Now developers can focus on enhancing the security of compiled OpenEdge application code. Developers can help protect their compiled code from corruption or tampering with new features like code signing and validation. This furthers the integrity and authenticity of the application, providing peace of mind and enhanced safeguarding of valuable intellectual property.
Progress OpenEdge 12.8 includes shorthand notations and extensions for common assignment operations using the equals operator to streamline and modernize the ABL language. These language enhancements simplify coding and allow developers to express assignments more concisely, resulting in cleaner and more readable code.
The VAR statement in OpenEdge has been enhanced in 12.8, offering developers increased functionality and flexibility. Additionally, the VAR statement allows expressions during variable initialization, empowering developers with customization options. OpenEdge 12.8 improves coding efficiency and provides a more streamlined development experience by facilitating direct instantiation of class variables within the variable declaration. Developers can now create multiple classes within a class variable array, enabling more versatile implementations.
OpenEdge 12.8 includes server-side aggregation support for Count, Average and Sum operations. This enhancement improves the usability of aggregates in ABL applications, resulting in improved performance and faster data retrieval. Developers can leverage these new functions to optimize data processing and achieve efficient application performance, whether working with indexed or non-indexed columns.
PAS for OpenEdge has several notable improvements in 12.8, focused on security and session lifecycle management.
PAS for OpenEdge supports JWE tokens, better streamlining integration into enterprises with strict security policies that require JWE-encoded forms of JWT tokens. This helps facilitate compliance with user privacy and confidentiality regulations.
Developers gain more control over PAS for OpenEdge sessions, allowing them to manage sessions based on various factors such as time, number of requests, memory usage or temp-table limits. This flexibility provides more efficient resource utilization and improved application performance.
PAS for OpenEdge includes support for OpenID Connect, a widely adopted identity protocol. This enables user authentication and returns user information to the application via an Identity Token, helping to facilitate more secure user access.
Progress OpenEdge 12.8 empowers developers with an array of features to increase productivity and streamline the development process. With support for OOABL collections, enhanced developer tools in PDSOE, improved language syntax, advanced security measures and integrated performance tracing and metrics support, developers can more efficiently build robust applications while reducing development costs.
By embracing the power of Progress OpenEdge 12.8, developers can unlock their full potential and deliver exceptional business solutions in less time.
To learn more, watch our “Did You Know? Developer Productivity” webinar.
]]>Whether you need to run business logic on one or multiple data models, creating, testing and maintaining business logic is always a difficult task. There are many reasons why this is the case. Some of the reasons we hear most often are:
In this blog, we’ll explore how Progress Corticon.js solves this problem and transforms the development of business logic for complex rules. The transformation lies in how rules are directly developed, tested and maintained by business specialists who do not need to be programmers. In other words, the rules are owned by the business group itself. When using Corticon.js, business logic becomes real services, and the role of the integrator is to use these services as efficiently as possible.
This blog is for architects and application designers working with MarkLogic databases and associated system applications. It shows how, as a decision-maker, you can greatly improve how business logic is developed, tested and deployed. It is also useful for integrators of such systems as they get an understanding of how a no-code decision service can be integrated into the MarkLogic processing pipeline.
We will explore how business specialists provide these decision services with a simple car insurance example. The insurer is charging a user on daily usage. Specifically, the use case is to compute how much to charge the user based on distance driven today, risk level of zones driven and vehicle cost.
In Corticon, business analysts work with two main artifacts to create a decision service, rulesheets and ruleflows. Additionally, Corticon provides testing at the decision service level (system testing) or the rulesheet level (unit testing).
In the rulesheet, the analysts express the rules conditions and associated action. In the ruleflow, they express how all rulesheets are connected to create a decision service.
In this simple example, we see how a decision service is decomposed into three independent rule sets (three Corticon rulesheets). There are many advantages to such a decomposition. For one, this allows for scaling as each business analyst can work on their specific domain independently.
Additionally, the ruleflow—as its name indicates—specifies the order of execution.
Additional constructs are available to modelers. Of course, a ruleflow can specify different branches to execute depending on business data. For more complex projects, a ruleflow can be decomposed into subflows for better organization and scalability.
The core of the business rules is written in a familiar spreadsheet like the interface shown in the following image.
For example, rule 2 specifies that a driver, aged 18 to 25 with 2 years of driving experience, has driven today a distance in the range of 1 to 29. All that sums up the cost to be 3.98. Additionally, for all cases (column 0), the business analyst records the computation date and computes the driver’s age.
One key aspect of enabling business specialists to author business rules is to provide a common understanding of the data available for processing as input and output.
Corticon provides a view of the enterprise data in an easy-to-work way for the business specialist. If needed, it provides an optional mapping between the actual data and the business representation. This allows business users to work with names or terms that are more familiar to them without impacting the integration of the decision service into the rest of the application.
Typically, as an architect or application designer, you may have to provide this vocabulary to the business specialists.
Here is an example view:
Note that this is an oversimplified vocabulary for illustrating concepts. In practice, Corticon supports very complex vocabulary with very deep relationships (1 to 1, 1 to n or many to many). It is common for us to see a vocabulary containing thousands of items; that’s why we have a filter capability that allows the user to narrow complex vocabulary down to area of interest.
As you have seen in the example, business specialists focus on the business rules in a technology-agnostic fashion. That is, they do not have to be trained or even understand the programming language(s) of the solution with which the decision services integrate.
To provide an integration point, Corticon allows the business rules to be exported to specific target platforms. Corticon supports Java, .Net and JavaScript.
The export process is typically done within a CI/CD pipeline but can also be done interactively with Progress Corticon Studio. Here is an example of a Corticon dialog for packaging the rules for execution:
The decision service “Calculate Daily Insurance” is exported for integration with MarkLogic and could also be exported to various serverless cloud functions or even exported to run directly in a browser. Corticon provides a lot of architectural choices to future-proof your solution.
When exporting to MarkLogic, you will get a decision service that can run directly in MarkLogic as server-side JavaScript providing high performance and simplicity of deployments.
Using a no-code solution for developing some of your MarkLogic business logic provides tremendous value:
In a future blog, we will explore two design patterns for decision services in MarkLogic server-side JavaScript. Stay tuned.
If you want to know more and get a demo of what we covered in this blog, feel free to register for the MarkLogic Community Event April Edition. You can also enroll in a free training for Corticon.js.
]]>To highlight the enormous impact APIs are having, the DataDirect team recently commissioned a study designed to uncover how APIs are used across industries.
The study determined that:
The survey allowed us to ask our share of questions. But with all that’s going on with APIs, we thought it made sense to allow others to do the same. Enter our Ask Me Anything webinar. The session was a great opportunity for the DataDirect team to spotlight what we’re up to in the space, and how our customers are using DataDirect for data connectivity. With a large audience in attendance, we opened the floor to questions. So many great questions were asked during the webinar, I wanted to highlight the top four we often hear from organizations trialing our software, along with our responses. Here goes…
It can. For example, OpenAI's DALL·E REST API can build a visualization where one can enter a text description of a scene or object and it will generate an image. Another example is the sentiment analysis API from IBM Watson that allows a user to point to a review, or comment on a news story, and respond with sentiment analysis like fear, anger, happiness or sadness. Pretty interesting use cases that will further evolve as artificial intelligence becomes more mainstream.
It is very much dependent on the performance of the REST API itself. Fortunately, we see most APIs are well-designed these days, particularly software-as-a-service commercial APIs. However, DataDirect can do things to maximize the performance. These include the passing of filters so a DataDirect user can capture and leverage any filters the API has, so only the data the client is interested in is requested and passed over the network. Also, if the result set is large enough to come back in separate pages, rather than bringing it back all together in one very large payload, DataDirect will come back in smaller payloads. And finally, DataDirect can set up separate threads. These threads are configurable within DataDirect Autonomous REST Connector, and the REST response can be processed in parallel. Essentially, if you have four threads requesting the larger results set, DataDirect will divide it into fourths and run all four retrievals in parallel. Also, if you have a select statement with an IN clause, DataDirect can divide and conquer with parallel threads. We’ve designed DataDirect to help you maximize performance wherever possible.
When one asks about using an Autonomous REST Connector against Progress OpenEdge, that would mean going against a REST service—usually the Advanced Business Language (ABL)—rather than directly against the OpenEdge database. To go directly against the OpenEdge database, you would use a Progress DataDirect ODBC or JDBC driver and execute SQL against it. In the case of an Autonomous REST Connector, we’re talking about ABL code exposed via a REST service, which DataDirect Autonomous REST Connector would be able to leverage.
This is a common question within cloud environments. The model file being referenced (the REST file) can be retrieved from the file system and via HTTP or HTTPS. It’s as simple as pointing it to the URL.
Hopefully, this post sheds a bit of light on the things you’ve been curious about, but if not, we’re always available to answer your questions. If you want to learn even more, visit the DataDirect Autonomous REST Connector page and catch the full webinar recording.
]]>On February 29, executives and employees from some of Massachusetts’ top tech companies came together to celebrate the region’s businesses, leaders and technologies that have made a positive difference in the past year.
MassTLC’s Tech Top 50 honors local companies, individuals and accomplishments that exemplify leadership and excellence in the Massachusetts technology community. The awards span ten categories: CEO of the Year, CMO of the Year, CTO of the Year, Mosaic, Business Accomplishment, Startup of the Year, Social Responsibility, Workforce Culture, Cybersecurity Response and Responsible AI.
“It’s been a challenging year for the tech industry, and despite that, we see the strength and resiliency of this ecosystem.” said Sara Fraim, CEO of MTLC. “Massachusetts continues to prove that we are a force for innovation and business strength.”
We were thrilled to receive an honorary certificate for Workforce Culture, which celebrates our unwavering commitment to fostering a dynamic work environment. We were also nominated for the Social Responsibility Award, which recognizes companies for their efforts to give back to their communities.
The highlight of the night came when Dr. Shirley Knowles, our Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer, won the prestigious Mosaic Award. The award recognizes an individual for their exemplary leadership within their company in the development of a more equitable, diverse and inclusive tech workforce in Massachusetts.
Shirley has been an advocate for inclusion and diversity both within Progress and beyond. In 2023, she hosted and presented at events, sessions and conferences worldwide on the topics of I&D and belonging. At the Women in Tech conference in Boston last fall, she spoke about how to become an ally for people different than you.
“Thank you, MassTLC, for this award. There is a community of Progress employees who are inclusion and equity champions as well, so this is for them, too,” Shirley said.
We’re proud to be recognized as a leader in workforce culture, social responsibility and I&D. In January, The Boston Globe included Progress in its annual “Top Places to Work” list for the third consecutive year and named us a 2023 DEI Champion for encouraging policies that support diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Earlier this year, we also received the bronze “Employer of the Year” award of the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, highlighting our commitment to fostering an inclusive work environment.
“Our culture thrives because our people are as committed to one other as they are to our customers, partners and to the community around us,” said Katie Kulikoski, Chief People Officer, Progress. “They continuously act according to our values, hold one another accountable and identify new ways to support the global community—all while continuing to serve our customers. It is an honor to receive these accolades because they recognize the amazing work of our people.”
Our people drive Progress, and without them, we wouldn’t get this kind of recognition. It’s inspiring to see the work they do each day, and the awards from MassTLC give us even more reason to be proud to work at Progress.
]]>Progress positioned alongside 13 other evaluated vendors in the Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms by Gartner.
For the third consecutive year, Progress has been recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP). The annual report, published February 21, recognized Progress as a Niche Player for its Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.
Gartner—a research and consulting firm—has released its 2024 edition of the Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms. The Magic Quadrant is a market research report offering “visual snapshots, in-depth analyses and actionable advice that provide insight into a market’s direction, maturity, and participants.”
“Magic Quadrants,” the market research provider says, “compare vendors based on Gartner’s standard criteria and methodology. Each report comes with a Magic Quadrant graphic that depicts a market using a two-dimensional matrix that evaluates vendors based on their Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.”
Gartner defines a DXP as “an integrated set of technologies designed for the composition, management, delivery and optimization of personalized digital experiences across multiple channels in the customer journey.”
For the 2024 report, Gartner analyzed and positioned 14 vendors across different categories, such as content management, cloud capabilities, composable architecture, support for multiexperience presentation and many more.
The Progress Digital Experience (DX) portfolio includes a range of products focused on enabling organizations to rapidly build and deliver more expansive digital experiences across websites, portals and applications.
At the center of our DXP offering is Progress® Sitefinity®—a composable digital experience platform that powers omnichannel experiences through actionable insights, underpinned by a value-driven approach with seamless integration with existing technology stacks.
Powered by Progress® Sitefinity® CMS, organizations can build and manage innovative, engaging and personalized customer experiences with capabilities that streamline marketing and development tasks, simplify common technical challenges, and offer high value at a competitive cost.
“We believe this recognition by Gartner validates what we hear from our customers, which is that Progress delivers intelligent tools for marketers and an extensible platform for developers that create engaging web and cross-channel digital experiences,” said Loren Jarrett, EVP & GM, Digital Experience, Progress. “We remain steadfast on our journey to continuously innovate and help modern enterprises unlock their digital potential and drive forward their mission-critical initiatives.”
We are grateful and honored to be among the vendors recognized in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.
Download your complimentary copy of the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms report.
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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms; Irina Guseva, Mike Lowndes, Jim Murphy, John Field; February 21, 2024.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
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Progress will begin accepting applications for the 2024 Women in Tech Scholarship Program in Bulgaria and the Akanksha Scholarship for Women in STEM in India on Friday, March 8—just in time for International Women’s Day.
Part of Progress’ Women in STEM Scholarship Series, these awards aim to increase the representation of women in computer science, software engineering, IT and/or computer information systems in Bulgaria and India. The third scholarship in this series, the Mary Székely Scholarship for Women in STEM in the U.S., began accepting applications on January 18. Applications for that scholarship will close on March 15.
“Appropriately, the United Nations’ theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is, ‘Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress’, putting a spotlight on greater economic inclusion for women and girls everywhere to reach their full potential,” said Yogesh Gupta, CEO, Progress. “We’re thrilled to offer scholarships that lend a helping hand to young women to advance their education. As a global software company, we feel it is our duty to support the journeys of future women leaders and innovators in STEM.”
The Women in Tech Scholarship in Bulgaria includes two annual scholarships worth BGN 3,000 each. Young women in their second, third or fourth years at accredited universities are eligible to apply.
Since its inception, several exceptional women have received the Women in Tech Scholarship. Our 2023 recipients, Elitza Yotkova and Alisa Dermendzhiyska, have excelled academically and have been active members of their communities. Elitza is studying computer science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics (FMI) at Sofia University, while Alisa is studying computer systems and technologies at the Technical University in Sofia, Bulgaria.
“I am honored to be a recipient of this scholarship and look forward to maximizing this opportunity to enhance my skills and knowledge in the IT sector," Alisa said. "By supporting women in technology, Progress is paving the way for a brighter future, empowering girls to pursue their passions and contribute to the ever-evolving world of technology.”
Completed applications are due April 12.
The Akanksha Scholarship for Women in STEM in India is a four-year, renewable scholarship of up to INR 1,50,000 annually. Women who reside in India and are currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in computer science, computer information systems, software engineering and/or IT are eligible to apply.
Last year’s recipient, Soumya Teotia, is a student at BITS Pilani in Hyderabad, India. She’s currently enrolled in a five-year dual-degree program, studying both computer science and mathematics.
“Presently, my area of interest is machine learning and artificial intelligence, specifically computer vision,” Soumya said. “I have a plan of working on the intersection of medicine and computer vision so that I can improve diagnoses and healthcare. If you use the power of artificial intelligence, it can do wonders.”
The deadline to submit applications for this scholarship is April 12.
The Mary Székely Scholarship for Women in STEM is a four-year, $10,000 per-year renewable scholarship awarded to a Massachusetts resident. The application process opened on January 18, 2024, and will close on March 15.
The Women in STEM Scholarship Series is part of our corporate social responsibility program, Progress for Tomorrow. Through these scholarships, we’re helping to increase representation in STEM around the world. We’re proud to be able to give back to the people and communities we serve.
The Concepts Server, a new feature available with the Semaphore 5.8. release, presents a powerful, scalable and flexible store for published models. This feature, like the Semantic Enhancement Server (SES), provides a RESTful set of APIs to query your model information that is friendly to a wide variety of contexts, from command-line tools to JavaScript browser apps. This service, backed by Progress MarkLogic rather than SOLR, provides a wide array of API improvements, especially for larger models.
First things first though: let’s quickly do a round of introductions.
The Semantic Enhancement Server (SES) is a high-speed index that enables you to search for information in the model in real-time. It is used as a single source of truth for downstream systems that need model information and in metadata authoring workflows to double-check to see that “approved” values are used. With the help of SES, users can navigate their content effectively, helping them to refine search results or offer related concepts from the model. These results can be leveraged to suggest related areas of interest and show associated documents, containing the concepts, people, places and organizations that match search criteria.
In Semaphore 5.8, we introduce the Concepts Server that has substantial functional overlap with SES including features like Tree Viewer, Concept Mapping, SAYT and Visualizer. In our efforts to provide better integration with MarkLogic, the new feature uses MarkLogic Server as a backend. It is not a replacement to SES, but an additional feature available to Semaphore and MarkLogic users. This new feature is designed to guide users at query time towards concepts that are used during classification time. With Semaphore 5.8, we have created a new model that has a lot of functional overlap with SES – this is based on the MarkLogic database and we took the opportunity to refresh the API that the data returned is much more flexible and better represents the data of the model itself.
The tool can be used as a server for downstream systems, allowing users to get large chunks of the model out of the read-only version with one call. It has been tuned so that data is streamed to calling applications, which means it has much lower memory footprint and it is designed to support these large-scale queries, while serving demanding clients at API level for elsewhere in the enterprise.
With its new capabilities, the Concepts Server revolutionizes how businesses manage and store their semantic models.
Faster Response Time: The Concepts Server supports faster time to the first byte in responses irrespective of result size. This means that the time between the initial request and the server’s response is significantly reduced to accelerate time to insight.
Multiple Languages at Once: The Concepts Server is designed to return labels and properties of all or a selected list of language tags in the same response. With Concept Server, if you want data for multiple languages this can be achieved in a single request – just present the list of languages for which you want data as part of the request with the “lang” parameter.
More Compact Data: The Concepts Server enables clients to specify which data they want to return and reduces the amount of movable data.
Full Paging: Response data includes total response size along with limit and offset parameters. This means that the client fully controls the amount of data returned for each request.
More Comprehensive Filtering: The Concepts Server offers numerous ways to filter data for responses. This enables more precise and contextually relevant information retrieval, enabling users to navigate and filter vast amounts of data to find the most relevant information to their business use case.
If you want to use the Concepts Server as part of your Semaphore 5.8 installation, here is how to get started. Imagine that you have published a simple model “Test” to Concept Server and want to query for all the concepts in the model, but only want the GUIDs and preferred labels in all languages to be returned. You can construct this query using RESTful get request as follows:
http://[SERVER]:5092/models/Test/concepts?extracts=id,prefLabels
You can page through the results if desired using limit and offset (zero-based) parameters:
http://[SERVER]:5092/models/Test/concepts?extracts=id,prefLabels&limit=100&offset=0
Responses by default are in JSON format, and are tabular in appearance:
Publishing a model to Concept Server requires you configure a MarkLogic Server backend in the Concept Server Service configuration file “marklogic.properties.” If the specified MarkLogic database does not exist, Concept Service will create it:
Concepts/conf/marklogic.properties:
## Marklogic server configuration
marklogic.host=localhost
marklogic.port=8000
marklogic.monitoring.port=8002
marklogic.admin.user=admin
marklogic.admin.password=myadminpassword
# The name of the database where the documents will be stored.
# If the database does not exist, it will be created.
marklogic.database=Concepts
# The name of the forest which will be attached to the database.
# If the forest does not exist, it will be created.
marklogic.forest=semaphore-concepts-forest
After you have configured Concepts Server, you need to configure Concepts Service inside a Semaphore Studio environment:
Studio KMM provides a default publisher configuration file for publishing to Concepts Service services:
Once the publish completes, you can use a browser to fetch data. I know you’d like to see how all of this translates into the real world of day-to-day tasks; check out this video to learn more about this exciting feature.
The new feature in Semaphore 5.8 further increases the productivity of Semaphore users tasked with the management and dissemination of semantic models. Contact us to migrate to Semaphore 5.8 and experience this new feature.
Employee Appreciation Day is a great opportunity for businesses to recognize their employees for the great things they do each day. Many organizations wouldn’t be what they are without the people who work there—at Progress, that is certainly true. Employee Appreciation Day is a yearly reminder to take the time to celebrate all that a company’s employees have accomplished.
But what is the best way to do that? How can organizations make sure they’re celebrating their employees in a sincere way? While a free lunch is always a nice perk, some may be wondering if there’s something more they can do to show their gratitude.
Below, we’ve listed three ways businesses can celebrate Employee Appreciation Day.
Sending out a collective thank-you message to everyone on your team or at your company is a good way to recognize Employee Appreciation Day. But giving a considerate, well-thought-out note to specific employees, highlighting their achievements and contributions? That’s a great way to recognize Employee Appreciation Day.
Whether given in-person, online, publicly or privately, a thoughtful thank you can go a long way. It shows you see the value employees bring to the team or to the company as a whole, and it shows you’re grateful to have them as your colleagues.
Boundaries have always been a key part of professional life. It’s important to communicate when you’re available, what deadlines are feasible for you and when your personal life needs to take priority over work.
With many companies having adopted either a hybrid or remote model post-COVID, boundaries have become even more important. Understanding that employees can’t always be available—even in a virtual environment—is a simple way to respect your colleagues.
Providing realistic, manageable deadlines at the start of a project is also something to keep in mind. Trusting your employees is essential as well: trusting that they’re doing their best, that they’re capable, and that they’re able to show up for their team.
Sure, having a day on the calendar dedicated to employee appreciation is great, but what’s better is celebrating the work employees do on a regular basis. This can be done with a simple thank you, a fun activity, some kind of award or an unexpected day off. Recognizing the achievements of your colleagues weekly, monthly or quarterly is a great way to show them that you appreciate them.
You may think about starting a recognition and rewards platform or providing employees with access to educational and wellness resources. Whatever the method, prioritizing employee appreciation will keep your employees feeling engaged and valued.
This Employee Appreciation Day, take the time to recognize the colleagues who you think make your company—and work experience—great. It doesn’t have to be extravagant, but a little thought goes a long way.
]]>The Progress Semaphore 5.8 release brings exciting new capabilities that empower business users to harness the full potential of their data. By leveraging the new features and enhancements of Semaphore 5.8, organizations can optimize their data modeling processes, enhance their data classification and analysis efforts, improve application security and stay current with the evolving technology landscape.
Organizations today deal with vast amounts of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data from diverse sources, including databases, files and external sources. This leads to data silos and fragmentation. With this proliferation of enterprise information, companies are left with many gaps in the way they process and use data, which can be hard to identify unless data is contextualized. To sustain a competitive advantage, organizations with complex and unstructured data need to invest in semantic technology to realize the business value of their information, extract intelligence and drive innovation and change.
Complex data highlights the need for more modern data management approaches and putting data into context. Progress Semaphore, a leader in semantic AI technology, is the perfect fit for organizations that want to break down data silos, harmonize diverse datasets and gain a comprehensive and contextualized view of their data. Embracing semantics not only enhances the quality and reliability of decision-making but also positions organizations to thrive in an era where agility and data-driven insights are fundamental for success.
“Organizations need to adopt data-centric architectures. For operational efficiency of course, as the TCO of historical app-centric architectures is exploding, but that’s only one side of the story. The data requirements of modern business applications, generative AI initiatives and more general business optimization are putting a renewed emphasis on data modeling, data governance, stewardship and the creation of knowledge from data. Semaphore 5.8 brings exciting new features and capabilities in all those areas, and I look forward to a rapid adoption of this new release by our customers,” said Matthieu Jonglez, VP of Technology at Progress.
With Semaphore 5.8, users can have a better and more unified platform experience, enhanced interoperability and flexible integration within their ecosystem for quality, data-driven outcomes.
Get a live exploration of Semaphore at our webinar, “From Unstructured Data to Rich Insights with Semantic Technologies.” Save your spot for the March 26 session.
The Semaphore 5.8 release demonstrates a solid commitment to developer productivity, user experience and information governance. Some of the new features and enhancements include the new store for published models, text-mining side panel, enhanced data modeling capabilities, alert manager, upgrades to the Classification Server and Precision and Recall Tool. By leveraging these new and improved features, business users and data architects can maximize the value of data and accelerate time to insight, while driving down integration and maintenance costs.
Whether you're an Information Architect seeking to construct a tailored knowledge model or a classification workflow, an Application Architect aiming to integrate data with other systems or a business user striving to accelerate time to value for data-driven projects and improve decision-making, Semaphore 5.8 offers a comprehensive suite of features to help meet your needs. Let's explore some of the new features that will enhance your platform in multiple ways.
The Semaphore 5.8 release introduces a simpler way of mapping more sophisticated relationships by empowering users to add metadata on relationships. This enables the qualification of relationships between concepts with extra data as well as the creation of multiple groupings of metadata on an individual relationship. One of the significant use cases for this feature is related to the user’s ability to create time-constraint relationships, including the ability to define multiple time periods.
This image illustrates how users can add metadata on their relationships, for example, by defining a start and end date.
The Semaphore 5.8 release is designed to scale the modeling experience by enabling users to manage large semantic models and quickly display data from them. The Concepts Server, the new store for published models, delivers a high-availability, read-only model interface backed by the MarkLogic database. This offers efficiency, flexibility and ease in storing semantic knowledge models while supporting consistent performance even when working with extensive data sets. It incorporates some of the current Semantic Enhancement Server (SES) capabilities, like search-as-you-type, concept-mapping and advanced filtering, which allows users to enrich their existing enterprise search, content management systems and more.
This image illustrates an example of JSON output from the Concepts Server.
With Semaphore 5.8 you can say goodbye to the complexity of integrating with downstream systems. The Concepts Server supports REST, GraphQL and JSON, enabling developers to better integrate with a more reliable and flexible response format. By introducing a new GraphQL endpoint, users can request the data they need, in the format they want, providing a more efficient alternative to the traditional REST endpoints. This facilitates optimal performance and seamless integration with other systems.
The Semaphore 5.8 release introduces an efficient method for receiving alerts, as data users can now get alerted when their model is published. This is another remarkable feature that enables users to be aware of changes likely to affect downstream systems, accelerate the time-to-market of model changes and facilitate effective coordination between teams.
This image illustrates how users can activate their alerting options.
In a world powered by data-driven decisions, it’s essential to analyze large amounts of data and extract valuable insights. The text-mining side panel facilitates the semantic querying of classified content stored in the Progress MarkLogic database, searching for patterns of common metadata and phrases to enrich models in a meaningful way. This is a critical feature that results in a better fit between the model and the data, leading to actionable intelligence for smarter decision-making.
This image illustrates the evidence extracted from a document corpus with the help of the text-mining tool.
The latest release offers many more exciting features, which can you explore further on our data sheet.
Upgrading from an old Semaphore version you’ve used for decades to a new version may seem like a big task. As a result, many businesses in our Semaphore community choose to stay on their current versions even when those versions might no longer be supported. It’s important to continuously provide value to businesses and drive efficiency. The Semaphore 5.8 release helps companies maximize their technology investment and revolutionize the way they work with their data. Here are the top three reasons to migrate to Semaphore 5.8:
In today’s business environment, where change is inevitable, embracing the latest advancements, frameworks and architectures is paramount so your platform stays relevant, supported and adaptable in the long run. By modernizing your platform, you can enhance the user experience and embrace the latest technologies.
Advancements in technologies lead to increased performance, efficiency and scalability. With the Semaphore 5.8 release, your business can improve response times, reduce downtime and enhance overall user productivity.
As businesses expand and evolve, the need for seamless integration with other systems becomes crucial. Migrating to the latest Semaphore 5.8 release facilitates a seamless integration with other modern technologies, APIs and third-party services so you can make the most of your data.
Today’s business users must leverage tools like the Semaphore 5.8 release to uncover meaning and context from their enterprise information. The unique capabilities and features in the Semaphore platform enable companies to support key business initiatives like improving customer experience, increasing productivity, reducing costs, driving key decision-making and reducing operational and reputational risk. Upgrade to Semaphore 5.8 and unlock the full potential of your data in today's fast-paced, data-driven world.
]]>OpenTelemetry is a powerful and standards-based observability framework that helps you monitor and tune the performance of your applications and services. With OpenTelemetry, you can collect and transmit telemetry data, such as metrics and traces, from your distributed systems in a consistent and vendor-neutral way. You can also gain insights into the health of your Progress OpenEdge database and PAS for OpenEdge components and trace application behavior and performance to identify and optimize bottlenecks and critical areas.
OpenTelemetry allows you to use your preferred observability tools to analyze the telemetry data from your OpenEdge applications. This gives you more flexibility and control over monitoring and optimizing your application performance. It also helps standardize the collection and transmission of telemetry data for backend observability in APM (Application Performance Management) tools. This enables Progress OpenEdge applications to support the Bring Your Own, best-in-class APM tools initiative and effectively serve your diverse application performance-monitoring needs. The supported observability tools include open-source and enterprise APM tools that support OpenTelemetry.
By using OpenTelemetry, you can achieve your optimal business goals by improving the observability and performance of your applications and services. OpenTelemetry is a valuable tool for enhancing your application development and deployment experience.
OpenEdge 12.8 seamlessly integrates with Apache Kafka, one of the most powerful event-streaming platforms in the market. This integration enables your OpenEdge applications to join the event-driven architectures that use Kafka, allowing you to achieve real-time interaction and responsiveness between applications.
Event-driven architectures are essential for today's dynamic business landscape, where applications must react quickly and efficiently to changes and events. With Kafka for OpenEdge, you can stream messages from an OpenEdge application to synchronize, import and export data, send critical alerts to monitoring systems and much more. You can also use transactions to facilitate reliable and consistent delivery of messages from the ABL to a Kafka cluster.
Kafka for OpenEdge is a game-changer for ABL developers, as it allows you to leverage the power and scalability of Kafka for your OpenEdge applications. Kafka for OpenEdge is a valuable tool for enhancing your application development and deployment experience.
Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) is a feature that helps you protect your sensitive data from unauthorized access or exposure. With DDM, you can dynamically mask your data based on user roles, permissions or preferences without affecting the underlying data or database performance.
DDM is a great solution for Security or Database Administrators who need to enable OpenEdge business applications with data privacy and integrity compliance requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA and PIPEDA. DDM allows you to easily obfuscate the sensitive data at run time based on user role permissions, so only authorized users can view the original data. DDM also simplifies data management and helps you meet stringent data security regulations.
These are just some of the amazing features and enhancements that OpenEdge 12.8 offers. To experience the full potential of OpenEdge 12.8 for yourself, download it today and start developing modern applications with ease and confidence.
]]>When we’re assessing the user experience of a website or application, what exactly are we looking for? What makes a site especially usable—or especially difficult to use? One of the most common models for breaking down this question into a more easily quantifiable and measurable system is Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics.
The word “heuristic” simply refers to an approach or strategy that works more as a rule of thumb—not necessarily scientifically tested or 100% accurate all the time, but rather a good mental shortcut or helpful generalization. By nature, that also means that there will be exceptions to the rules; a site that “violates” one or two of the heuristics in this list isn’t automatically a bad or unusable site. However, we can feel pretty safe in saying that when when the criteria isn’t met for many or most of these, there’s probably a usability issue (or several) that needs to be examined.
Nielsen’s heuristics were originally created in 1990, then refined down to 10 in 1994. In 2020, they were reexamined and adjusted slightly for clarity—however, the 10 heuristics themselves did not change. As Nielsen says: “When something has remained true for 26 years, it will likely apply to future generations of user interfaces as well.”
That being said, let’s take a look at what these include:
Users always need to know what’s happening and what the current state of the website or application is. Imagine you’ve just completed a form and hit the “Submit” button—but there’s no confirmation dialog or other visual change. Did it go through? Did your internet connection lapse? Do you have an error that needs correcting? Should you resubmit, or will that cause an error?
When users interact with elements and see no change in the system, it can be unsettling and confusing. In Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design, the authors describe the user interface as our way of having a conversation with the user—similar to the way that a receptionist might help a user in person at a hotel front desk. If you were to check in at a hotel and make a request for a wake-up call, but were met with total silence … it would be pretty weird, right? You’d wonder if they’d heard you at all or whether you were at risk of oversleeping your morning meeting.
In the same way, we need to make sure that our interfaces include active feedback to keep the user apprised of everything happening “behind the scenes.”
The language, layout and approach that we use within a website or application should always align with the user’s real-world experience. That means that everything from where elements are on a page to the words we use to describe things should be user-centric and tailored to the way that they move through the world. That sounds obvious, but can actually be very challenging—mostly because our own lived experience is often very different from that of our users, and when we design and develop we’re always doing so from the basis (and bias) of our own experience.
It’s very easy to make assumptions about what users know, how they think and what experiences they will have had. Of course users will know what a widget is, that’s a common term … right? Of course users will be able to identify that icon as a drag and drop symbol, that’s an industry standard … right?
The answer, of course, is that it depends entirely on your user base. A younger, more technically-savvy user base might not have any issues with those examples, but an older user base could struggle more. It’s our responsibility to conduct user research and gain an understanding of the people who use our applications and websites in order to more accurately tailor the content and layout to them.
However, it’s crucial to keep in mind that users are not a monolith. You’ll likely have users of many different capability levels, experiences, backgrounds, etc. using your product. It’s often a good idea to build in multiple ways of accomplishing tasks, so users have flexibility in choosing the approach that works best for them. We’ll talk more about this in heuristic #7.
Users are not going to get everything right the first time—that’s just a fact. No matter how wonderful or intuitive our UI is, there will still be folks who make mistakes, forget things and have to go back, or need to undo an action.
Part of what makes users feel comfortable and engaged with a piece of software is the knowledge that they can freely experiment and know that the stakes are low. That means that the consequences for simple actions should be minimal: clicks can be unclicked, navigation can move backward and forward without getting lost, choices aren’t permanent. Changed the color to red—oops, didn’t like that!—click undo. This is referred to as safe exploration, and it’s an important way for users to learn the application interface and functions.
Obviously, there are some situations where users do need to make important, permanent decisions: placing an order, deleting an account or similar. In those situations, we need to clearly communicate to users 1) at which point there’s no turning back, and 2) what exactly will happen afterward. Always allow users an “escape route” or a way back—all the way up until the point at which that’s no longer possible.
This one has two main interpretations:
Both have to do with the concept of mental models. A user’s mental model is the understanding they build and the assumptions they make about their current experience, based on the similar experiences they’ve had up until now. For example, most websites have a logo in the top left corner that will take the user back to the home page when clicked. Linked text in a webpage is underlined. Right-clicking will open a contextual action menu.
When these things don’t happen—or worse, when something else unexpected happens—it throws us off. Our mental models no longer line up and now we have to both learn a new system and remember that the system is different for this particular website / piece of software. That increases a user’s cognitive load, or the amount of mental effort and energy that it takes to complete a task.
By meeting the wider standards of web and application design, we allow our users to carry over everything they’ve learned and all the behaviors that have become second-nature to them from years of tech use. Things “just work” because we’re not forcing them to go against the grain and learn something new in order to use our product.
Mental models also can be (and are) constructed on a product-by-product basis. Maybe our application uses a specific color system to designate different types of information, or maybe our navigation menus are organized in a certain way. If that were to differ between applications in a shared product suite, we’d be disrupting our users’ mental models—and creating a higher cognitive load for the users who have to switch back and forth between those systems regularly.
Errors are inevitable. Whether it’s a system bug, a user mistake or some combination, it’s important that we prepare for the reality of errors in our software. However, even better than error mitigation is error prevention. By making smart choices during the design and development process, we can create products that reduce the likelihood of errors happening in the first place.
For example, users on mobile devices are more likely to misclick or “fat finger” something, especially in a compact page layout. We can help prevent that error by making the clickable areas—or target sizes—larger and more forgiving. We can also be smart about where we place interactive elements on the page, and how much empty space we build in when we need to place them close to each other. Finally, if a user does misclick, we can make it easy for them to go back, undo or otherwise negate the unintentional action (as we discussed in heuristic #2).
This combination of preventative measures means less stress for the user—and for us.
Users have a lot going on, and our software is a comparatively small part of that. Schedules, grocery lists, work to-dos, personal tasks—the details of our particular UI tends to be pretty low on that list. As someone uses the interface more often, over time it will stick in their memory, but that takes time. We can help reduce that time and reduce the amount of effort it takes to use the UI by working based on the assumption that our users won’t remember it.
Practically, that means surfacing relevant information as needed, in the context of the task, rather than expecting our users to recall all the details. It might be visually efficient to just use icons in our menu, but that means we’re placing the burden on our users to remember what they all mean. That burden might be pretty low for common icons, like a house for “home” or a gear for “settings” … but it could also be more difficult. Does a light bulb icon mean “see a tip” or “toggle on light mode”?
Those things could make perfect sense to an established user, but new users will have to wrack their brains to remember, over and over again until it sticks. By adding a label to the icon, we reduce the cognitive load required to use the application.
Remember when I said we’d talk more about the whole “multiple ways of accomplishing tasks” thing, way back in heuristic #2? Well, now it’s time! “Flexibility and Efficiency of Use” is all about creating flexible paths and processes, so that users of different experiences and capabilities can all feel comfortable using your product.
A great example of this is a well-designed and prioritized keyboard navigation experience. Keyboard nav benefits a wide variety of users: from experienced “power users” who appreciate the speed and ease, to visually impaired users who require it for accessibility purposes. By enabling useful keyboard shortcuts and well-designed keyboard navigation, we can allow those users to engage with the software in the method that’s most comfortable to them.
Consider the use case of filling out a long form. A new user might work through the form more slowly, clicking on each input box with their mouse and considering their response. An experienced user (who has filled out this form a hundred times before) might tab between the input boxes and copy/paste the content without ever touching the mouse. A visually impaired user will make use of a screenreader in combination with their keyboard to complete the form. If we’ve built the form to be flexible, all three of these example users will be able to complete it in their preferred way, using their preferred tools.
This is a heuristic with a name that can be a little misleading at first, because “minimalism” can also refer to a very specific, sparse visual style. However, that’s not what we’re talking about here. In this case, “minimal” simply means that every element on the page serves a purpose.
Think of it kind of like the Marie Kondo method—she doesn’t say that you need get rid of everything in your house, she simply asks you to question its purpose and whether it “sparks joy” and discard the things that don't. We should approach the elements in our user interfaces with the same curiosity: What purpose is this serving? Is it making the website or application a better place for the user? If not, can we remove it?
We can vastly improve the user experience by creating designs that are a) visually appealing, and b) not cluttered with elements that don’t further the user’s goals. Every time we place a new element into a layout, we should think: “What is this helping the user achieve?” When we have too many items on one page, it becomes distracting; it makes it more challenging for the user to parse what’s needed vs. what isn’t in order for them to complete a particular task. Often, users refer to this kind of design as “clean”—it feels straightforward, intuitive and easy to understand at first glance.
As wonderful as it would be if we could simply prevent all errors by using the guidance provided in the error prevention heuristic, there will still be cases in which errors do happen. When they do, it’s our job to make sure that users can see that they’ve happened, understand why they’ve happened and know what the next step is.
Recognizing an error means that a user knows the error has happened in the first place. That might seem like common sense, but remember that some errors happen on the system side—bugs, unexpected inputs, connection failures and other things not necessarily related to a user’s mistake. Many times, those errors happen “behind the scenes” but still have implications for the user experience—anything from longer-than-expected load screens to full crashes. Regardless of how the error came to be, we need to make sure the user is aware that something went wrong.
Diagnosing an error means that a user knows why the error occurred. Again, this might be due to their mistake (such as a form validation error) or a system issue (dropped connection). This should always be communicated in user-friendly language, so avoid using overly technical terms or error codes that won’t be meaningful to them.
Finally, recovering from errors means that a user knows what they’re supposed to do next. This could be simply an acknowledgement that the error happened and communication that no action is needed from the user, a prompt for the user to try the action again, instructions on how the user should revise their input, or possibly just the right language for a user to effectively communicate their issue to a help desk. No matter what the follow-up action is, we want to make sure we don’t leave them hanging, unsure of how to resolve the problem.
We talk a lot about intuitive user interfaces as the ideal—wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of the products we created were so crystal clear that you could simply look at them and immediately understand everything? However, that’s not always realistic. Sometimes the systems we build are, by nature, complex systems meant to solve complex problems. Advanced video or photo editing software, applications for banking or money management, specialized healthcare websites—all of these are examples of situations where even the best, most intuitive visual design can only get us so far. Sometimes the necessary complexity of the software calls for written instructions and additional explanation.
When this is the case, we need to make sure our documentation is as thoughtful and intentional as the website or application itself. That means good search capabilities, well-organized content, easy-to-understand language and straightforward steps that users can follow to accomplish tasks.
Now that you have this list of heuristics, how are you supposed to use them? A great way to leverage this knowledge is to use the heuristics as a kind of checklist for internal review. While it’s always ideal to put work in front of users to get their feedback, we can often catch a lot of easy mistakes or UX shortcomings by using these heuristics to evaluate the product ourselves, first.
This also saves time and money—usability testing takes a lot of organization and effort, so you don’t want to “waste” that on catching the obvious mistakes. Ideally, you want user feedback to be the kind of nuanced, contextual, experience-informed stuff that you won’t be able to mimic with an internal review. By using these heuristics to make sure you’ve checked all the low-level boxes, you can concentrate your user interviews on higher-level, more insightful feedback.
Try using this list as a basis for internal review—you might be surprised how much you’re able to improve the product before it’s ever touched by a user!
]]>When Irfan Syed joined Progress back in 2010, he didn’t expect to be here 13 years later. As someone who likes to constantly take on new challenges, staying with the same company for that long seemed unfathomable.
Fast forward to today, Irfan still has the same desire to be challenged professionally—and he’s still at Progress. Learn more about Irfan, his move from India to the U.S. and more in the interview below.
While studying for my engineering degree, I was selected to work at a multi-national software company in India. I had the privilege of being part of the first group at that company to undergo training in software testing, which enabled me to learn new software technologies and collaborate on customer applications. Interacting with clients to fulfill their software needs became an integral part of my role.
After that, I worked for several firms in India and UAE before getting an opportunity to work for Progress in 2010. In 2015, I continued my employment with Progress by relocating to the United States.
My wife had to move to the U.S. because of her job, so I asked Progress if they could relocate me. Within a very short amount of time, they came back to me and said they could do that.
It was a mixture of everything. Moving to a new country and being away from extended family is hard, but it somehow worked out well. I moved one week before my wife did, and we asked a few friends of ours who were already living here for help finding a house in a good community. By the time my wife and child came to the U.S. the week after, we were all set.
Progress gave me enough time to settle down before I started working seriously, so it was a smooth transition. We’ve now been in the U.S. more than nine years, and we’re both enjoying our stay and our work.
Most of the engineering teams at Progress follow the SAFe Agile Process. We plan our work at the beginning of the program increment to achieve a specific objective. In this process of getting the work done, we collaborate with individual teams and teams of teams. Without trust, we would not be able to plan, execute and accomplish the work, and provide it to the customers to seek feedback.
The trust in individuals and teams is essential for us to execute our plan, and having that trust significantly contributes to achieving business outcomes.
I am currently working on a new SaaS Product. It provides a lot of opportunities for me to define modern standards for testing, use cutting-edge technology, build dashboards to assess quality and a lot more. As this is a new product, I’m able to implement and learn up-to-date quality standards, which is very exciting for me. Implementing and establishing these standards in this product will enable us to leverage them in other products.
I’ve said this to my friends and colleagues: I did not expect to work in a company for more than a year or two, because I get bored easily. But somehow, Progress has kept me motivated and made me stay for more than 13 years, and that’s a miracle. This is a testament to the many attributes of Progress:
These are the attributes I would use to describe Progress, and they’re what make Progress a great company.
When I am not working, I spend most of my time with my family. I also love volleyball and aim to play at least twice a week. I regularly participate in local volleyball tournaments in Massachusetts.
I may have earned a master’s degree in Electronics and Communications and pursued my career in that field. If not, I would have started some kind of startup, as I was deeply passionate during my formative years. Or I would have pursued teaching—I was greatly inspired and influenced by my teachers and their experiences.
Personally, I am very much excited about the acquisition strategy. In a world where everyone is crafting exceptional software, we love to integrate the software we build with other cutting-edge solutions. Progress’ strategic acquisitions bring that to fruition. The fantastic technologies we acquire aren’t just additions, but perfect complements to the software we already have. We get to integrate products and build something technically great that not only meets market needs but also leaves our customers delighted.
To get to know other Progressers like Irfan, read more of our employee interviews here.
]]>The average adult spends a couple of hours on social media every day. If you already find yourself dropping in on Instagram, YouTube or TikTok each day, why not spend some of that time using social media to grow your business?
In this post, we’ll look at nine creative ways to use social media as a web designer. Whether you’re a freelancer, employed or running an agency of your own, there’s a lot you can do with social media to get ahead professionally.
Social media was once just a place to be social. Now you can use it for all kinds of things. Here are some ways to put it to use for your work as a web designer:
When I say secondary portfolio, I don’t really mean using social media as a backup to the one on your website. While you can certainly show off the same samples on both platforms, I think that social media would be a better place to showcase other work.
Your website portfolio should be lightweight and easy to scroll through, containing your latest and greatest work. Your social media portfolio, on the other hand, is a great place to show off works-in-progress, personal projects, older samples, samples from outside your typical niche and so on.
For example, you’ll find vastly different examples in the website portfolio for Ronas IT:
Than you will in their Dribbble portfolio:
Their website portfolio only has 13 works in it. Their Dribbble portfolio goes on and on, showing off a ton of versatility in the agency’s work.
Do you ever feel stuck? Like you know what it is you have to build, but you’re not quite sure how to get the aesthetic right?
Social media is chock full of inspiration. Whether you’re looking for full-on product concepts and mockups or smaller details related to things like imagery, fonts, colors and so on, you’ll find it on visual-centric platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.
For instance, here’s what a search for “fintech” on Pinterest comes up with:
There are different ways to gather inspiration here, too. You could use the categories at the top to filter the types of fintech content you see.
Another option is to scroll through the results and see if you spot any trends that’ll help you start piecing something together for your project. Even if you take a step back and look at this single screenful of content, you’ll notice certain trends—like data visualizations, the color purple and futuristic imagery.
If you work on your own, you may occasionally wish you could run something you’ve created by another person. Sure, you could show it to your significant other or friend, but you know they’ll say they love it no matter what (or maybe they won’t get what they’re looking at and the feedback will be just as useless).
Social media could be a good place to go for unbiased feedback on your work. For example, Sajjad Latifi uploaded an online video editor web app concept to Dribbble and then asked people to share their feedback.
Sometimes you don’t even need to ask for feedback. If you have a big enough following and you post regularly enough, you’ll get feedback from your followers regardless.
Blogs and other digital publications aren’t the only places where you can stay on top of industry news and trends. You’ll find plenty of social media users and accounts are covering this material as well.
What’s nice about social media is that you can consume news in your preferred format. For instance, if you go to text-based platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn, you can read up on news and trends in abbreviated text formats.
Video-based platforms like YouTube, on the other hand, allow you to listen to and/or watch news from your favorite channels and creators.
What’s also nice about using social media for this is that you can subscribe to your favorite sources while also creating a custom-aggregated feed of everyone else you want to hear from. This way, you don’t have to actively seek out information all the time. Your custom-curated feed and notifications will keep you in the loop.
Even if you’ve been working as a web designer for some time and have enough work coming your way, you can always benefit from more digital clout.
For starters, social media clout can help you attract new opportunities. I’ve been invited to speak on a number of podcasts because of the stuff I posted on social media (specifically, on Twitter/X).
Social media clout can also help your website SEO. Although Google doesn’t emphasize this a ton, the authority you build around your social media account can help give your website a little boost in search. Just make sure the channels are linked.
You can also use social media clout to grow your following. A larger following will make it easier to do some of the other things on this list—like find new clients and make money via social media.
The trick to building clout is content. Valuable content. And it doesn’t just need to be your own content. You should also share content from trusted resources. If you tag those resources in your posts, it’ll help you expand your reach and authority as well.
As a web designer, you also need to make sure your content looks great. While you could share text-only posts or rely on whatever featured images are connected to your content, the end result might not be as aesthetically pleasing.
So you’ll want to spend time giving your social media posts a professional polish as @quixoticdesignco does on Instagram:
This account posts a good mix of photo-only and text-and-photo posts to keep things visually interesting. Everything aligns with the company’s branding, too.
Being regularly active on social media, using that time to share high-quality content and interacting with others will help you find new clients. But there are other ways to use these platforms to get more work.
For example, you can use social listening tools like Sprout Social to scour your social channels for things like:
You can also monitor your own feed for relevant content. For instance, I found myself a web design job earlier this year from among my connections on Twitter/X. He was confused and concerned about a ridiculously high quote he received for a template design. So I DM’ed him and made my pitch.
There are other ways to find new clients. One of the easiest ways is to add “hire me” and a link to your contact form to your bio. That’s what @cassidy.foxtrot does on TikTok:
It might seem like an insignificant detail. However, her account has over 45,000 followers. Imagine if just 1% of those followers realized after watching her great content that they needed help and she just so happened to offer it?
You can go with a bolder, more direct approach on social media, too. It depends on how urgent your need for work is.
For example, Kira Vella is a UI/UX designer. She used this post on LinkedIn to let people know she was looking for work:
But she didn’t just say, “Looking for work!” She took the time to put together an effective 30-second pitch. She explained the type of work she could do, where she wanted to work and also highlighted her skills. At the bottom, she added relevant hashtags to help prospective employers and clients find her more easily.
By using a platform like LinkedIn that gives you the space to write this much content and to format it in a user-friendly way, you can share news and requests like this.
If you’re working on a project that requires the expertise of another type of creative, social media could be a good place to find them.
For instance, let’s say a client wants you to create an infographic. You have no problem designing the graphic. However, you’re not comfortable writing the copy for it. The client is paying you very good money to do this, so you want to make sure you nail it.
So you might start your search for “saas infographics” on Pinterest:
This will not only be a good source of inspiration, it could also help you find the people who wrote these infographics. And if they’re available to take on work, you can pitch them your project.
There are different ways to monetize your content on social media. Joining creator programs like the ones on YouTube and TikTok are one way. So as you upload your videos, you get paid as ads are shown to followers and other people watching your content.
You can also do things like promote affiliate-sponsored products or services and link to your own digital products. For example, beneath a web design process video that Megan Weeks posted to her YouTube channel is a list of links for interested viewers:
There are links to her courses, bundles, shop as well as affiliate links for various products. She’s also included her Calendly link so that people can book coaching calls. She has all her bases covered.
Just make sure that when you do this, you’re not overwhelming followers with too many links. They should all be relevant to the information shared in your post. This will make users most likely to go looking for the links and then to click on them.
Not every social media platform has built-in communities or networking opportunities. There are two that stand out to me as the best places to start your search for online connections.
Facebook is a good option if you’re looking for active professional communities. LinkedIn is also helpful and will also give you a chance to connect with former and existing clients and coworkers.
Even if you’re not actively seeking more work, it’s beneficial to have a network and community you can turn to. Whether you’re working with a troublesome client and need advice or you’re wondering how to tackle a particular project, online groups are a great place to go for support and help.
Before you go jumping onto your TikTok or LinkedIn page to post about UX design, though, here are some general social media usage tips to keep in mind:
As you can see, there’s a lot more you can do with social media besides watching puppy videos or uploading photos from your trip to Mexico. Whether you’re looking for ways to grow your business or move ahead in your career as a web designer, the nine tips above will help you do more on social.
]]>In today’s dynamic work environment, businesses are facing an immense volume of both structured and unstructured data, streaming in from various sources. While structured data, residing in databases and spreadsheets, offers clear formats and organization, unstructured data from sources like emails, social media and documents presents a wealth of valuable but often untapped information. This information is often fragmented—dispersed across the enterprise in various formats and types. Amid this wealth of information lies a challenge and an opportunity for businesses: how can these disparate datasets be united into a coherent and meaningful whole?
Data harmonization is the process of defining a common language to your data from different data sources, formats and structures to create a holistic view of all enterprise information—regardless of its location or type. This common language can be used by businesses to make smarter decisions. It’s not merely about blending information; it’s about refining, cleansing and aligning data elements in a single unified schema.
Data harmonization is critical when dealing with multiple data sources, legacy systems or diverse datasets—all of which impact the entire organization. Data harmonization helps connect data across business processes, identify sensitive information and uncover your most valuable assets.
According to recent research by the Business Insider (2023), 69% of CFOs consider having a single source of truth for enterprise data critical for running an enterprise.
With data harmonization, companies can channel data from various sources into a more holistic, standardized and comprehensive view across the organization. With Progress Semaphore, companies can create a more unified view of their data, while keeping their data in their systems of records and applying metadata tags to improve their understanding of that data.
Data harmonization is a critical part of streamlining data information management. The process of data harmonization will vary from organization to organization, depending on the variety and volumes of data, the specific context and the business priorities.
The first step in data harmonization is to define your metadata. Some organizations get tripped up by assuming they must have one metadata model. This is not the case. In fact, you will probably have several. For example, you may want to leverage industry-defined metadata models and incorporate those into your own business vocabulary. It’s okay to have multiple models within your company, but its paramount that you understand the linkages between them.
Now that you have created a “common language” by properly defining your metadata, you can classify, auto-tag, enrich and extract your data regardless of source or type. Join data from different sources—varying file formats and naming conventions—and transform it into a cohesive data set.
Whether you’re using Power BI, Tableau or a simple pivot table in a spreadsheet, you’ll need to connect your data to your business intelligence tools. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to this step, but you should select your data harmonization tools with a robust API so you can make the necessary connections to your toolsets. This will help equip you with a true 360-degree view of your data.
The shift towards a data-centric business economy has increased the pace of data collection and the need to orchestrate this data into a harmonious and coherent whole. Businesses are facing an exponential surge in the rate of terabytes of new data generated daily, which according to Statista (2020) will be over 181 ZB by 2025. The data required for making important business decisions may come in different forms and formats. It could originate from customer research, market research or various departments within the organization.
Unstructured data stands to be one of the most valuable resources in an organization, and its rate of growth is staggering. However, companies rely mainly on their structured data and use it to make business decisions. The reality is that typically only 20% of an organization's data is structured, which can lead to bad business decisions because organizations often ignore the other 80% of their data, which is unstructured. This can result in chaos, inefficiency and missed opportunities. When data is harmonized, there’s a greater chance of finding missing patterns and pieces of new data, which can ultimately impact results. Additionally, when data isn’t spread out or presented in different forms, it makes it less likely that opportunities will get overlooked by management.
This rapid growth can be even more painful when organizations lack the advanced technology and management systems to extract value from their data. Using technologies like knowledge graphs, data harmonization software and a semantic metadata hub to harmonize information can have a significant impact on every aspect of the enterprise, from linking data across business processes and identifying sensitive information to discovering the organization's most valuable assets. With these types of technologies, organizations can:
Data harmonization makes it possible for organizations to transform fragmented and dispersed data into valuable information for creating new insights, analyses and visualizations.
Data harmonization offers a wide range of benefits to business users. From streamlined operations to enhanced business intelligence and decision-making capabilities, data harmonization emerges as a cornerstone, empowering enterprises to extract value from their data. The following are some of the main business benefits:
Enhanced compliance and governance – Data harmonization supports regulatory compliance and data governance by providing the underlying framework to describe and identify every type of data throughout your business, whether structured or unstructured.
The following best practices offer a guide for navigating the challenges associated with harmonizing data, promoting data quality and facilitating seamless integration for organizations seeking a unified and reliable data foundation.
Data harmonization generally involves the combination of automated processes and manual methods, which requires expertise from data stewards in automating the overall process and implementing a data harmonization strategy.
Create a metadata model—or models—that can adapt to future needs. This enables organizations to react quickly to changing business requirements.
Before starting data harmonization efforts, set clear goals, identify potential challenges and gain a comprehensive understanding of your company’s data. Have a clear vision of what data harmonization is all about and the results your company wants to achieve. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Prioritize your use cases and pick one to start with. Once you achieve success in one data harmonization project, others will fall into place with less effort.
Data harmonization use cases varies across industries, depending on the variety and volumes of data, the specific context and the business priorities. From healthcare to finance, manufacturing to media, companies are navigating complex data environments by harmonizing their data to unlock the full potential of their diverse data sets.
The more data you have and the more “specialized” your language is that you use to talk about your data internally, the higher need you will have for data harmonization. Do you use acronyms to describe acronyms to describe acronyms as a common course of your business? If so, chances are you are ripe for simplifying your business with a data harmonization strategy.
A good data harmonization example is the multinational biotechnology company, Amgen, which works with thousands of suppliers that supply hundreds of thousands of items. They wanted to enhance logistics intelligence to improve supply chain efficiency and understand which items across which suppliers were the same and do it efficiently. The company used Progress MarkLogic multi-model data platform and Semaphore’s semantic AI capabilities to harmonize data from disparate sources and create a unified dataset, resulting in improved efficiencies.
While data harmonization focuses on aligning and integrating diverse datasets from various sources to create a consistent data view, master data management is a more strategic initiative, involving the management and governance of core business entities to provide a single, reliable source of truth. Master data management focuses on the creation and maintenance of master data, implementing data governance policies and facilitating consistency and quality in master data.
Data harmonization and master data management are complementary strategies. While data harmonization focuses mainly on the consistent application of data and metadata, master data management focuses primarily on the instance (or record) data itself.
Bridging the gap between structured and unstructured data is no longer an option but a necessity in today’s data-driven world. Moving forward, making critical data-driven business decisions with a complete set of enterprise information will be essential for business productivity and growth. By harnessing the power of all their data, organizations can gain a competitive edge, drive innovation and uncover valuable insights that fuel their growth.
Watch our webinar, Data Harmonization for Better Business Decisions, and discover first-hand how harmonizing your data can modernize your analytical capabilities, foster informed decisions and unlock hidden insights within your organization.
]]>Progress Sitefinity proudly presents the annual Partner of the Year award to SilverTech, a digital experience agency within our Sitefinity Premium Partner program.
The Partner of the Year acknowledges a Sitefinity Partner who has made a substantial positive impact within our vibrant Sitefinity community. This distinction goes beyond numbers—it’s about the stories of dedication, creativity and excellence that shape the Sitefinity experience.
The award recognizes partners who demonstrate a commitment to innovative implementations, an in-depth knowledge of Sitefinity, and a desire to expand the Sitefinity brand. Partners are selected annually based on their accomplishments and contributions within their respective markets.
The 2023 award recipient, SilverTech, is a digital marketing agency with more than 25 years of expertise. Their commitment to developing websites for energy, utilities, higher education, banking and government sectors has set new standards. The loyalty they have built with customers is a testament to their dedication.
The partner we celebrate is not just a contributor; they are a trailblazer. They stand out for:
Going beyond individual projects to actively contribute to the growth and reputation of the Sitefinity brand. Becoming Sitefinity (MVP’s) Champions due to their engagement in our community:
Winning numerous Sitefinity awards for the projects they’ve created:
As we celebrate the Partner of the Year, we not only applaud SilverTech’s achievements but also express our gratitude for the positive influence they bring to the Sitefinity journey.
“We are delighted to recognize SilverTech as our Partner of the Year,” said Chris Knepp, Sitefinity Senior Partner Account Manager. “Their exceptional work in leveraging Progress Sitefinity’s capabilities to deliver transformative digital experiences highlights their dedication to client success and innovation. SilverTech exemplifies the qualities we value in a partner, and we look forward to continued collaboration and success together.”
Cheers to SilverTech our Partner of the Year—a dedicated Premium Partner in the Sitefinity Community!
At Progress, our partners are core to our success. We have developed a robust, yet simple-to-engage partner program to meet the unique and diverse needs of partners of all sizes and business models. We realize that a true partnership is all about value and trust, so we keep the conversation going, listen to our partners’ needs and continue to add resources and incentives to help our partners be successful.
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