Worldwide Education Quarterly September 2008

Table of Contents

1. Welcome, from PSC Corporate Education Manager Michael Archdeacon
2. Continuous Service Optimization with Actional®, by Elaine Rosenberg
3. Revised Sonic® ESB Curriculum Rolls Out, by Linda Stinson

A Message from Michael Archdeacon, PSC Corporate Education Manager

Hello and welcome to our latest issue of the Worldwide Education Quarterly. As you know Progress has been in the business news a great deal lately and, consequently, our issue this time will be somewhat truncated. There is a lot of activity around here and writing newsletter articles was not high on people's priority stack. The good news, though, is that we should have much new and exciting Progress training news in subsequent issues.

- Michael Archdeacon

New course: Continuous Service Optimization with Actional®

By Elaine Rosenberg

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables architects and developers to define the use cases of an enterprise in terms of a set of services. The use cases are designed by business analysts and implemented by developers as a business transaction or business process. The developers of the business transaction are concerned with the correctness and performance (time/resource) of the business transaction. These concerns are typically the responsibility of the IT department of an enterprise. The business analysts and stakeholders of the enterprise are concerned with how the business transaction impacts the success or failure of the enterprise. These are two very different perspectives and it is difficult to measure how the run-time behavior of a business process from an IT perspective relates to the business outcome.

Actional® for Continuous Service Optimization is a Progress Software product that helps both IT and stakeholders of an enterprise measure business outcomes and relate them back to the services of a business transaction. .

The newly-published course, Continuous Service Optimization with Actional, teaches you how to monitor business transactions from both an IT perspective and from a business analyst/stakeholder perspective where the business requirements can be tied back to the infrastructure components managed by the IT developers.

Course overview
This course is intended for developers, architects and business analysts who will be defining use cases for their enterprise. Before you take this course, you should have taken the course Managing Operational Visibility with Actional which teaches you how to monitor service traffic, troubleshoot service problems and create policies.

The modules of the Continuous Service Optimization with Actional course include:

New course format
This course is published in a new format that is PowerPoint-based training along with demonstrations and hands-on Try Its. This course is available as set of published books and CD for use in an instructor-led classroom setting. The duration of this course is two days.

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

Elaine Rosenberg is a Senior Course Developer with Progress Software.

Revised Sonic® ESB Curriculum Ready for Rollout

By Linda Stinson

Last year we proposed a number of changes to the Sonic ESB curriculum, including:

• Split a single monolithic ESB course into multiple training courses with better focus and depth
• Offer a blend of ILT and WBT delivery formats
• Provide assessment testing
• Update to Sonic 7.6

Now those changes are nearly complete and we’re excited to announce that the latest Sonic ESB courses are ready for rollout. The revised Sonic ESB curriculum consists of the following titles:

Progress Sonic SOA Overview
This course provides an overview of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), architectural components of Sonic ESB, and Sonic ESB products and tools.

Introduction to the Sonic Workbench Development Environment
This course covers Sonic application development phases and tasks, and the Workbench interface.

Developing Applications with Sonic ESB: Designing ESB Processes
In this course, students learn and practice skills to define itineraries involving file-based interfaces, branching, and transforming and routing messages through services on the ESB.

Calling Web Services, Accessing Databases and Writing Custom Services
In this course, students learn how to add services to the ESB by calling out to Web services, integrating databases, and implementing custom services.

September is here and it is back-to-school time. Why not sign up for Sonic ESB training today?

For instructor-led training, contact your regional training coordinator. Customers and PSC employees can enroll in the PEC by completing the following steps:

1. Visit wbt.progress.com.
2. Select the Self Register option.
3. Review the legal terms of a subscription.
4. Complete the New User Registration page.

Linda Stinson is a Principal Course Developer with Progress Software

Curriculum At-a-Glance

Progress, AppServer, WebClient, PeerDirect, Progress Dynamics, SmartObject, OpenEdge, ObjectStore, Sonic, SonicMQ, ProDataSet, Actional, SOAPstation, and WebSpeed are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one it its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Java and all Java based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks or service marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

Copyright © 2008 Progress Software Corporation. All rights reserved.