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.