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Business vision and drivers (process start here)
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Technical goals achieved based on business drivers (30 minutes demo of the entire App Evo approach end here)
Inspiration
We get inspired by the willing of proofing and giving evidence of the effectiveness of the Progress App Evo strategy and approach by running a 30 minutes demo, tailored on customer needs that was enclosing years of experience on the field.
What it does
Create a web/mobile app in front of the customer showing how Progress can e-volve and modernise a whatever good'old legacy application (proudly running in production by decades) letting customer touch with hands the results of combining into a great solution, a PS prescriptive modernisation approach and architectural evolution, the productivity of Progress Rapid Application Development on-cloud platform and Progress integrated product portfolio: OpenEdge, Kinvey, DataDirect and Corticon.
How I built it
From a real life use case based on Car Sales. After an initial call to get and assess a few, quite generic and common business drivers and needs I got a sample of a few records extracted from real customer production DB (it was MapR data lake but was the same if it was an OpenEdge, an Oracle, a MSSQL or any other one). Transformed these records into JSON file we build a step-by-step process that show how to bring real data on the mobile device of an end user. I build the app at the same time I was explaining how to do this with the power of Progress.
Challenges I ran into
Being mainly an OpenEdge Consultant, a technical architect and App Evo / modernisation expert I was feeling strong on the process but when I start building the proto, I was not knowing nor the final customer system or database environment (originally was MapR data lake), nor I was knowing in details DataDirect HDP technology, nor I was having specific UI/UX designer or front end language skills (JavaScript / NativeScript). All started as an extremely appealing challenge... In the end, the lack of skills, that was a weakness, turned into a point of strength saying the simple truth to the customer: Progress simplify that big complexity for you to be on time, on target...
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
After building the proto in remote conf call, also without having met the customer f2f, we always had a follow up and we got compliments from both colleagues and customers about the effectiveness of the demo and the power of Progress. I am proud to be part of it. Building a process template the demo have been replicated and delivered by other colleagues in similar cases.
What I learned
Create a tailored, perfectly-fit and powerful solution that integrate and combine different Progress products and platforms. I learned a lot in terms of App Evo strategy, and a bit of 3rd party systems and database, VM, UI/UX, DataDirect, Kinvey, NativeScript, ...
What's next for E-volve your legacy application A to Z with Progress stack
Create a video, and a try it out repo.
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