Comment Progress marketing refresh

Rob Fitzpatrick

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
So Progress changed their branding and colour scheme, again. The web sites have been updated, except for orphans like Progress Communities and Customer Order Management.

I get the feeling that Marketing was planning a Halloween party when they chose the colour palette. Yellow text and logo on an orange background? Really? Yuck.

It's especially jarring on some pages, like the KB for example, because the rest of the white/blue colour scheme on the page wasn't changed. They just slapped a heavy orange banner across the top. It feels uncoordinated and rushed.

The home page Products drop-down provides this list:
  • Pacific (application platform as a service)
  • Corticon (business rules management)
  • DataDirect (data connectivity)
  • DataDirect Cloud (cloud data connectivity)
  • OpenEdge (app development)
  • Rollbase (cloud application development)

Nary a database in sight. Must be a bit demotivating for the DB team. Would it have killed them to say "OpenEdge (app development and RDBMS)"?

I'm not a fan of the new logo either. Maybe it's the asymmetry.
 

RealHeavyDude

Well-Known Member
I totally agree with you. But I've given up to speculate as to the why. Perhaps the powers that be are resistent to insight or advice from people that actually produce something tangible.

Heavy Regards, RealHeavyDude.
 

rzr

Member
I care less for the fancy color combinations...but I don't like the new forum navigation/layout one bit... :mad:...the old one was much more user friendly ...
PT rocks in this regard... !!!
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
The Dutch liked the color scheme ... several at Exchange were already equipped with sweatshirts and the like in the proper color!

Has there ever been a bullet for the database? I can't imagine why there would be since it is extremely remote that anyone is going to buy the database on its own. They might buy ABL for development, Rollbase for development, Corticon for BRM, or even OE BPM for BPM (unlikely without one of the others too) which all use the OpenEdge DB (or will soon) and their choice may in part be reinforced by DB features like TDE and multi-tenancy, but they aren't going to come after the DB on its own or as the lead.

As for Communities, are you still on communities.progress.com or community.progress.com ... the later is orange at the top and is the new site announced at Exchange.
 

Rob Fitzpatrick

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
Has there ever been a bullet for the database? I can't imagine why there would be since it is extremely remote that anyone is going to buy the database on its own. They might buy ABL for development, Rollbase for development, Corticon for BRM, or even OE BPM for BPM (unlikely without one of the others too) which all use the OpenEdge DB (or will soon) and their choice may in part be reinforced by DB features like TDE and multi-tenancy, but they aren't going to come after the DB on its own or as the lead.

Web sites don't just serve the purpose of generating sales leads, like development teams shopping around for products. I agree that anyone who is shopping around for just a database, as opposed to a development platform that includes one, probably isn't going to look at Progress, especially given all the free offerings out there that work well. But the fact remains that OpenEdge is a family of products and the Enteprise RDBMS is a product. It belongs in a product list.

Every new Progress CMO says they will solve "Progress who?" and yet time and again they keep their good products hidden away from view while giving the spotlight to the low-volume, poorly-integrated acquisition of the month (Stylus Studio, Shadow, Sonic, DataXtend, Actional, Artix, Apama, Control Tower, Fuse, ObjectStore, Savvion, Rollbase, etc. etc.). We in the community tout the merits of this database and Progress marketing seems ashamed of it. They talk about how their products talk to other databases... does that help the problem or hurt it?

I have to deal with that problem when I talk to clients and prospects and when there is turnover at existing clients. When I talk to them about this robust, enterprise-grade database (that they've never heard of), what are they going to do? Go to the vendor's web site. What does it say? "...Progress OpenEdge, a scalable and open platform that is compatible with any database..." That's a confusing message and it doesn't jibe with the description I've given them. Any meaningful information about the platform, about capabilities or competitive analysis, is either locked behind a partner portal or squirreled away in a web paper no one will look for because they don't know it exists.

As for Communities, are you still on communities.progress.com or community.progress.com ... the later is orange at the top and is the new site announced at Exchange.

Between the time of my post and yours they put in a redirect for the PSDN link at Progress Communities. This just reinforces my feeling that this change was very last-minute. So yes, the old site is gone (or at least less accessible) and almost unimaginably, it's been replaced with something much worse. A "forum" whose designers have no concept of proper web forum design and a "wiki" that was clearly named by someone with no concept of what a wiki is (hint: you can edit a wiki).

Go to community.progress.com. Try it out for yourself. Try to look at it objectively, not as a card-carrying Progress evangelist but as a technology user visiting a web forum and looking for information. When I view this site at 1920 x 1200 resolution, more than two thirds of the UI is taken up with banners, pictures, a redundant search bar, and three buttons that are each two inches square (!). Near the bottom there is one lonely "recent post"; the only bit of content on the entire page.

Then click on Technical users. Again, more Fisher Price UI design. There is a Home page that, again, shows one recent post. Next is a Forum page that displays five sub-forum names and five recent posts. This is the best they can do? ProgressTalk (and countless other web forums across the Internet) display dozens of sub-forums on a single page. The "wiki", as I said, is of course not a wiki at all. It's just another web page with some documents available for download. And finally there is Documents, which currently contains a grand total of 8 files. There were hundreds of documents in Progress Communities; where did they all go?

In short, they're trying to reinvent something that has already been done and doing it badly, so far. I expect things will improve, slowly, over time. But right now this new community site is a huge step backwards in content, usability, and design.
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
The DB is not a separate product, but is part of OpenEdge.

The new site is clearly not finished. Jean Richert, who is responsible for it, is very enthusiastic, but there are only so many hours in a day to get things done. Changes are planned and providing your feedback, there, not here (though Jean may read this too) is the way to improve it. In particular, I know that the plan is to open the wiki gradually. There have been spam problems recently. You may have noticed that some of the top level forums in the old site were moderated and it took a while for a post to show up. That is because they were being spammed and the old platform had no mechanism to control this other than moderating the problematic forums. The wikis will be editable in some degree in the future. It is likely to start with allowing editing only by trusted posters ... easing into it.

Frankly, the biggest issue I have always had with the forums ... other than various bitches about details ... is the level of participation. My understanding is that Jean has talked a number of ISVs into allowing their developers to participate ... potentially hundreds of people ... and has commitments from PSC staffers to monitor and respond. Traffic trumps whether you like the graphics.
 

Rob Fitzpatrick

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
The DB is not a separate product, but is part of OpenEdge.

It's on the price list as a separate entity. It has its own documentation and its own pricing, I can buy it without buying anything else, and showcfg itemizes it separately in the installed products on a box. That sounds like a product to me. Whether you think it's a product from a marketing standpoint is semantics and not worth arguing about. The important point, which stands, is that visitors to the site have to work harder than they should to uncover any RDBMS product info.

The new site is clearly not finished. Jean Richert, who is responsible for it, is very enthusiastic, but there are only so many hours in a day to get things done. Changes are planned and providing your feedback, there, not here (though Jean may read this too) is the way to improve it.

Yesterday I was browsing the site and found an issue. At the moment I can't even remember what it was, but that's beside the point. I looked for a "feedback" link but all I found was a generic "contact us" link which prompted me for 15 or 20 inputs, like name, title, employer, interest in products, etc. All of this info is in the user profile with which I was already logged in. Quite frankly, I'm not going to fill in all that crap every time I want to report a typo or broken link. If site feedback is too cumbersome or time-consuming to provide then they won't get as much as they should.

Traffic trumps whether you like the graphics.

If you reread my post you will find it is hardly concerned only with "graphics".

You may remember there was a quite a bumpy road for ProgressTalk earlier this year in the switch from the old forum software (vBulletin?) to XenForo, until Chris got things sorted out. Existing users were frustrated and unhappy, for a while new users couldn't even register at all. Participation plummeted as a result of the net losses in functionality and usability. Without a baseline level of functionality and usability, which any modern forum platform should provide, you don't get traffic. So what it may "trump" is moot.
 

tamhas

ProgressTalk.com Sponsor
As to being separate on the price list, so are AppServer, PDS, TranMan, WebSpeed, OE Mobile, TDE, MT, DataServer, Replication. Should all of them have separate listings?

I have pointed out the need for simple feedback to Jean. In the meantime, I would post to the General Forum under Technology Users.
 

Stefan

Well-Known Member
You may remember there was a quite a bumpy road for ProgressTalk earlier this year in the switch from the old forum software (vBulletin?) to XenForo, until Chris got things sorted out.

Just for the record, the 'bumpy' version of the software on this site was the result of a vBulletin 'upgrade' (from version 3 to version 4). XenForo (created by the people originally behind vBulletin) is what's in use now.
 

TomBascom

Curmudgeon
On the topic of "the database" I do agree with Rob that visitors to the site do have to work very hard to discover anything about the database. And given how common the misconceptions in the wider world are about the database being the product it might make very good sense to give it special treatment. Maybe not on the front-page drop down but it seems like it could certainly be worked in better on the OpenEdge page.
 
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