I want to share some exciting developments and a few housekeeping items. Summer has been busy indeed! We’ve discussed for some time that we plan to upgrade the EDN infrastructure of Embarcadero. That project also involves retiring some old sites, such as Code Central. In addition, we have some changes to SKUs that further enhance the value of Update Subscription. Finally, we want to get your feedback on training for onboarding new Delphi developers.
New EDN Portal
The current EDN portal was developed a long time ago using Delphi .NET technology. It is outdated at best. In the next 2-4 weeks we will launch a replacement EDN site that features a modern Ext JS interface and is very fast. We have had a limited beta, and the feedback is positive. We kept the UX similar to make the transition easier.
The new EDN also provides capabilities for filtering downloads based on Update Subscription status, which will give us more avenues to provide value-added content. There will be an exciting download for active Enterprise Customers with the launch of the new site.
Retiring Code Central
We provided an advance notice for the retirement of Code Central several months ago and Jim McKeeth just republished his blog with instructions for transferring data to GitHub The Future of CodeCentral. We will run the old infrastructure in parallel with the new for some time, but you should expect that over two to three months we will retire it. We will provide another notice two weeks prior to retirement. As an aside, the more Delphi projects one can find on GitHub, the more relevant is the language and technology, so keep contributing!
Changes to SKUs
We have decided to include the regular Enterprise Connectors bundle in our Enterprise and Architect Editions. We will continue to sell the Enterprise Connectors Plus edition in collaboration with C-Data. The bundle will be available to download through the new EDN portal for all new and active Updated Subscription customers on these SKUs. The Enterprise SKU should be the default SKU for all larger accounts, and we want to make sure that we keep adding value to that SKU. We also want to make sure that Update Subscription is valuable, and we’ll keep adding interesting elements to it via Getit and EDN. We have several such projects that will go in parallel with the 10.3.3 release next quarter.
We also made some updates to our Roadmap
We still receive questions regarding the Architect SKU that changed recently, and some developers are not clear on what is included. It now includes, Multi-site RAD Server Deployment License, Aqua Data Studio (ADS) License, ExtJS license, and more. Also, ADS now has full support for Interbase development, which is very exciting.
Onboarding Training for Delphi Enterprise Developers
We get a lot more questions from customers who want to upgrade or modernize their applications regarding onboarding new developers. Our efforts around Community Edition (CE) and Academic Edition are more long term. In the short term, one of the best ways is to train non-Delphi developers. The good news is that it is not as hard as one thinks. In fact, many find it as a welcomed change. We have reviewed some of the courses on Embarcadero Academy and feel that there are significant gaps. We plan to improve them, but specifically for Onboarding, we would appreciate some additional feedback on the type of training that you would prefer. We plan to develop and launch these next quarter.
Please take this short survey and tell us what you would like to see: Delphi Onboarding Training Survey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2TDMB9J)
Thank you again for being valuable customers! We are committed to making both our Delphi and C++ customers successful.