Servoy v2021.03 Launch Webinar Part 1

Good morning. Good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you are. Sean and Ron, can you guys hear me? Yeah. Yeah. Good. That’s important that you can hear me because then I can hear you. And we’re going to have a good webinar. Cool. All right, everybody. Well, so today is part one of the launch 0.3. Part one is a bit more business oriented, like why are we doing what we’re doing and what’s new. On Friday, sorry, on Friday, we’re doing part two. That’s much more technical. So hang in there, but this is going to be entertaining today. We’re also recording it. So you can watch it later on if you’re missing this or if you want to share it with your co-workers. There’s always, there’s the possibility to ask questions and chat with us. You guys are probably all familiar with with Zoom. If you’re having a hard time finding those kind of functionality, you can also raise your hand. There’s all kinds of options to interact with us. So feel free to do that. I’ll introduce our speakers. You see them on camera already, I think. So we got Ron Fenderberg, our CEO. I think he will kick this meeting off in a little bit and then we got Sean Devlin. He’s our product manager and very knowledgeable about the whole stack as you guys know if you’ve seen him before. I think we’re ready to get started. Janz. Yeah. Take it away. OK. Let’s do it. First, a quick look at the agenda for today. We’re going to introduce our next evolution in our flagship offering, which we call Servoy NG2. We’re also excited to announce the powerful new web component for dealing with documents, as well as some additions to our security extensions. And then finally at the end, we’ll do a quick update on Servoy Cloud, which is our continuous delivery platform for business applications. We have a three-miner that this is a two-part webinar series. So this is part one today. It’s more of the business track in the overview. So we’ll be getting into the technical stuff on Friday and doing some cool demos. So we have that to look forward to as well. Ron, I think I’ll kick it over to you to do a quick, maybe background of the Servoy story, if you don’t mind. Yeah, sure. I think before we dive into the details of what’s in this release, we’d like to take a small step back, or actually maybe a big step back, talking about the journey of Servoy. We started about 20 years ago, can you imagine, with a really strong vision in mind. And I think the vision today is the same as we had and vision 20 years ago. We really want to make a tool for developers around the globe to make really awesome business applications. We really were targeting developers who want to make sturdy enterprise ready, internet ready, cloud ready, beautiful, easy to use applications. And that’s still valid today. Of course, we wanted to give them a lot of power in their hands to make it very easy to develop those, those applications. And not limiting, let’s say, what you envision where you want to bring value to your customers, to the end users. And we did. And I think what’s also from early on, we envisioned that we, we want to keep that really future proof. So when things came up like deploying an application in the web browser, we gave you the web client, the first version of that, we gave you a mobile client. And as public cloud offerings became more and more dominant, we put several cloud into the offering. And like I said before, a really important part of this is to keep that stack future proof because we really want to unbird in our customers in not having to worry about their stack technology because that’s something they, yeah, we take care of. And we didn’t want them to like many other competitors get stuck in legacy. If you look like technology like Fox Pro, magic, progress, they kind of gotten stuck into into a legacy. And until now we’ve, we’ve lived up to that promise, I think, to keep that stack modern. But today I’m really proud that we, we keep on doing that. It took us at least three years to build a completely new modern front and technology without you were having to worry about that. And today we’re announcing share of our NG2. And I’m really, really proud of that. Yeah, I feel like we hit another milestone on this journey into future proof business applications and the companies that rely on them. When we launched the Servoy NG client, it was a pivotal offering for us because it came with the UX freedom that Ron discussed. From a technical point of view, once in a while I think every ISV or enterprise application team has to modernize their stack or else they get kind of stuck as Ron was saying. I feel like Servoy is just like our own customers. We’re no exception. We have to deal with this challenge. And that’s why we’ve been working on NG2 because it’s really kind of the underlying technology was holding us back a little bit. It was also more about the technology itself, which was Angular 1 or AngularJS, was nearing end of life. And this is something that mature companies deal with when their technology is becoming obsolete, that they have to look at, well, what do we do? Do we just kind of write it out as long as we can? Do we dig in and spend a lot of time to replace it? And a lot of customers come to us with the same dilemma because maybe they’re on a legacy technology that’s holding them back. And we never want to be that company. In fact, we’d like to empower our customers to avoid that bid fall. And it’s a real challenge for us. I think Ron said we’ve spent up to three years now already on the rewrite. But we take a lot of pride in it because it liberates us to focus on our customers, it liberates our customers to focus on their businesses and their users. Instead of thinking about technology, thinking about maintenance, it all goes in line with that idea of removing burdens. And for our long-term customers, they’ve been able to kind of seamlessly with technology as it changes and not really have to rewrite their own Servoyapplications. That work is done for them. And for some of them, they don’t even really need to know what’s under the hood. So we’re really happy about that. Yeah, that’s, I think it’s a really big leap forward for us. Angie, too, hopefully I think most of our customers won’t even notice it. And that’s I think really, really amazing. Although it takes a tremendous effort to get this engineered. Yeah, after such a big innovation for us, what other stuff could be bring to the table today? There’s going to be more exciting stuff I’ll tell you about, but maybe also stepping back a little bit on that is that we really like to be proud of helping our customers focus on technology or sorry, on value, run technology in how they take that technology and turn it into value. There’s so many stuff, so much stuff out there that you could take and eat up all your time just understanding that technology and then it’s not really value yet. So again, we like to really look around for stuff which we think we can can turn around in such a way that it’s very easy for you to take that and use it. And actually one of things I’ve personally been looking for for many, many years. I kid you not. One of our customers, we found this and we were able to bring it to the table for all of you to now start using is a document editor. And what would it mean for you to really embed document editor into a Servoy that’s not only beautiful to use, really full featured, but is really aware of the application. And yeah, that’s what we’re releasing also today is our smart documents editor. Right, yes. So the document editor is a web component. So this is a kind of component you can drag and drop on a form in an application and give end users the ability to modify customized documents. So it really empowers application developers to innovate and bring a best in class experience for their users. And it’s a really robust component. And so we’re really excited to announce it. In terms of some of the features of the document editor, users can of course they can edit documents and they have a whole range of tools and a customized toolbar and kinds of integrations and hooks that you would expect out of a powerful component. In terms of some of the use cases, I think a nice one is kind of like a threaded conversation or an activity stream where they can see rich comments that could be around like a help desk ticket or a customer like customer notes and a CRM. And they can see that those comments in line. And it also includes the ability to do like a merge capability. So you have email templates or certain printed document templates and you want to merge data from a variety of sources. And until then we have been able to integrate with a number of BI tools to do that. But that always requires an outside technology. It requires that you integrate the Servoy platform with another reporting engine and that’s a barrier in many cases. That’s one is native in the environment but also for the end user as well. That brings up another important feature which is a mentions or a tag inclusion. And this can come from data so you can imagine that if you’re typing a message on a customer note and you want to mention a customer service rep and then that could trigger an action like send them a push notification or an email around this particular customer. And then you’ll see it saved in the comments. It could also be tags that you can merge and replace when you’re emerging down an email template or a document template. So there’s a lot of flexibility there and a lot of programmer hooks. As I said before, Servoy integrates with a lot of business intelligence platforms reporting platforms and works really well for those kind of BI features. But one area we’ve seen for the beginning is people want to have ad hoc reporting which is when end users can customize or create reports and execute them without having to have some kind of developer integration or something like that. And there are platforms that do that but again it requires an integration often requires that those users go and learn a new tool and you want to make applications which are easy to use and are pretty seems for the experience. So we believe that allowing users to create and customize document templates is an excellent way to bring value into these applications. Of course you would expect that any kind of document editor will be able to export in a variety format and that’s the case here as well. So you could again merge a document with data and then export a PDF and download it directly in the browser or email it as an attachment or something like that. So again it would be kind of your standard requirements for document management. But we think overall this is a really huge leap forward in terms of a standard component that we can ship with the platform and we’re really excited to see where our customers taken. Yeah actually a feature you missed as John is you can copy base from Word for instance into this component. Oh yeah I have that in I think I took it out because it’s all a little too technical but yeah that’s actually a big deal for some of our customers. It’s a hard customer stuff on Word and they want to be able to just like paste out of Word and let it go. Yeah so that’s going to be a big deal. I think it’s for usability I think it seems technical but I think the usability of this is really really good and the component is really well featured. And also works from Google Docs as well. Yeah I know it’s an open-off stuff like that. I think it’s a nice really really nice and big feature to the platform. Yeah if we talk again a little bit about the platform and the accessibility of the platform of course the core of the software is really extensive and really robust. But over the years we learned that customers were I would say missing features but the features they were missing were not common to all. So I think 10 years ago maybe shorter we decided to think about how can we make this platform let’s say more extensible more plug and play because not everything is for everybody. And that’s why we started launching and building what we call extensions. Extentional things like we have an example which is called SVIU deals where you have calculations stuff in there we have one which is about navigation. So that’s one really important aspect of making our platform extensible and more let’s say fit for purpose purpose. And these extensions are typically I would call them non-functional right so SVIU will not build a CRM for you to start using. But these are a little bit more under the hood but a really common and SVIU security is one that’s really really common. Of course there’s other ways you can extend the platform with and one of course we’ve just talked about is a is a web components. So we have Google Maps and you have now this editor there’s a bunch of them. Another way other things to extend is we also bring templates to the table and those are all things which you can use to extend the platform almost like plug and play for you to use. Today we talk about share of security which is I think one of the most common and most used extensions for a platform a lot of our customers use this and we today are also launching a couple of really nice features for SVIU security. But maybe good Sean before we dive into that I think that’s on the next slide. Let’s start a little bit about what SVIU security is for those who don’t know what it is before you. Right yeah yeah because we have a mix of people evaluating Servoyin this webinar and also some members from our community who might already know this. It’s an extension that was developed over many years in many iterations to deliver a lot of the really core features of any business application that are required from a security point of view. From the beginning Servoyhas been able to allow developers to deploy applications which are multi-tenant. So we’re talking about extensions that make it easy to manage potentially many separate company accounts into a variety of setups. It could be a multi-tenant database where you want to ensure that there’s a strict data silo between companies and one user never sees data for another company. It could also be a situation where you have multiple databases per one individual database per customer and you need to make sure that you’re properly forwarding all the traffic for a certain user to the right database connections. And there’s a lot of nuance in multi-tenancy as well. And this is a real requirement for companies as they were moving from many on-premise remote installations to something more of a hosted or a cloud or SAP’s offering. Multi-tenancy becomes a real challenge architecturally and since it was something we see so common, it was one of the very first features we included. That of course there is user management and these are controls to create, edit, lock, whatever users. And this is important to also be able to expose this for end users as well because if you’re a software vendor, you want to have some of your users with the capability to invite people to use the application or add a new user or delete a user when someone’s left the company. So that’s kind of an obvious inclusion. Of course we provide a variety of authentication mechanisms. So we have like the standard one which is users and are stored in a database and we authenticate them on password type basis but there could be many integrations with Active Directory or LDAP or other identity management platforms and the security extension allows for that type of integration. At the heart of it there’s control over who has access to which resources and from the beginning we’ve provided a powerful permissions engine which can enforce permissions at the UI level and also at the data access level so you can as a developer you can configure both and expose those to end users to distribute permissions to control who has access to what. We have session management so mechanism for tracking user sessions when they logged in, when they logged out and some other information around that they can be used to link with other logs and other data. This is a critical requirement for certain kinds of applications and of course that kind of links to full audit capability which is a requirement for many businesses. We see this of course in healthcare applications which not only have the audit changes to data but they need to even audit who has seen which data so we have the capability to audit on select as well. So that’s all kind of falling under the umbrella of the security extension that has been kind of growing over the years. What Sean is sobering? What’s new? Well for most of us you know we’ve been working with these extensions, most of our customers, this is kind of checking about right. It’s so obvious that this is in for us but I guess for competing platforms a lot of this stuff it’s really really difficult to get done right. But hey you know this is your voice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s often where you start to. You’re going to build an application and people you just say why I want to log in screen. It’s nice to just include it and it works. So what’s new and that’s why we’re talking about this particular extension today. In this release we’ve added token based authentication so I have listed as part of the core features authentication mechanisms. This allows you probably have used this on various cloud services, think like Gmail or something or the whole Google Suite. It allows you to remain kind of logged in or to remember devices so that if you use your logs in once they come back to the same machine and it will remember who they are unless they switch machines or go in and call it need a mode or something like that. This is a nice enhancement that has been requested for a little while and we’re happy to add it and it leads to the next kind of feature that piggybacks on it which is single sign on and this is I think more attractive because you can imagine a lot of our customers are software vendors and they are delivering a suite of applications. So not just like a monolithic system but it could be they have the back office system. They want to for example sign into CRM but then if they wanted then launch into a scheduling solution or something else they go through the same login again and their authentication is federated against the single point of entry. What we like to do is you say hey you logged into one application, you’re good if you want to spin off another in another browser tab for example a different application you can remain signed in. This is all configurable of course and we’ll be showing this in one of the demos on Friday’s webinar. All right thanks for that Sean. Yeah you all know that Sheriff of Cloud is a really important part of our offering and we’re helping more and more of our customers with our cloud offering. It’s important the goal is to give them a full fledged, say worry free integrated set of solutions running in a cloud which helps them to go through this whole devops cycle. We have tools to plan the product to roadmap planning for code code reviews, build test release deploy monitor everything and every day we work with customers, IVs who built all these complex applications a lot of demands and add simple small features to our cloud offering to get that better and more suited for what they do. So that’s evolving and typically it’s smaller steps I would say but I think what we’re really proud of is that today we can announce that we have now with our data centers worldwide coverage in every major time zone we are now covered. So yeah and we can start rolling it out to production environments for our customers. I think what’s also interesting is that an important aspect of Servoy cloud is that it allows our customers to test automation and test their applications for the full stack so not just their own business logic but also the complete stack which could include Servoy itself and we’ve always provided a way to test applications on like the next version of Servoy. So from our nightly snapshots we have customers that will want to know if there’s anything that breaks their application that we could be doing. I think that what we’ve added to the cloud with the inception of NG2 is immediately give the capability to build applications for NG2. So even before NG2 goes into a final release we can allow you to generate builds and test those before making the migration. Another feature we added which is I think a small one but something that had been requested is two factor authentication which can boost security for log into the cloud control center which I don’t know if you mentioned Ron at the area where our customers can administer their whole delivery pipeline. So that’s a nice addition as well on the home Servoy cloud. Yeah, it’s really nice. Does he get evolving? Yeah, to sum it up, yeah, NG2 is really here. I really would like to encourage everybody to look at it. On Friday of course we’ll talk about that more. Visit those extensions, the smart documents editor, really powerful editor that will come into everybody’s download soon. The new security in SVA security and a share of cloud. I think all I know this is a really big release again for us and I would like to thank the team here, the tech team who’s building all this stuff and release it stuff in time. Thanks for that. And yeah, I hope for our customers and the prospective customers that this is really we’re hitting again the goal that they want us to hit. So yeah, that’s really good. Evo, you just appeared. Hey, back. Sorry, I went to make another couple’s coffee. It’s early morning here. Yeah. It was that morning here. No, it was not. No, I could hear you guys of course. Evo, do we get any questions coming? Well, I’ll leave this slide up which I think Ron, do you want to say anything about the next steps? Will we leave this slide up and take some questions? Yeah, that’s true. That’s the questions and then talk about this. I guess. Okay. Okay. I’ve got a few questions that kind of revolve around the same thing. Maybe if I translate it, it goes a bit like this. I remember when we introduced the web client and all our customers were on smart lines and now the opportunity to move to a browser based solution, the question was of course, is this rewrite for us? Right? And what do we need to do? I think the answer back then and we started in practice was like, no, it kind of migrated automatically and you had the opportunity to take advantage of a lot of new things and obviously that takes some work to take advantage of that. I think the same happens when we moved from web client to Angie. And obviously we have a lot of people in this web and are right now asking the same question. So what happens now that we move from Angie to Angie to? I heard you guys say some customers won’t even notice it. That sounds like magic in all reality. What is there to do and what things can they take advantage of? What new things can they do with their applications? Well, maybe first I’ll put it here from the top down perspective. It’s our goal to make such a migration effortless. And I think for certain applications it will be virtually no effort. So I think that’s good and I think the tech team here did a really, really amazing job. I thought it was not really possible but they did. But I guess maybe Sean can talk a little bit about that. The more responsibility people took in building their really custom stuff in Angie client, the more responsibility they will have in Angie too. And that’s what we always talk about. You can take a lot of responsibility yourself in Sanrio, but then we can’t have that responsibility. So I think that’s where if you try to stay as close to what we do as you can, then it’s as effortless as possible. Maybe Sean can elaborate a little bit more about that. Yeah, I think that this just to sort of qualify what the change is here. It’s a bit different than the introduction of new clients in the past because those were really functional leaps forward. When we went from a smart client, which was a desktop client to the web client, it was going from native desktop application to a browser application. So it was a leap forward in terms of deployment, it was a leap forward in terms of what you could do. The same when we went from the class web client to the Angie client that was like opened up the front and architecture. So you had total UX freedom, a lot of like that’s why we have web components today. So all of those were like if you’re moving forward, you also want to be really aware of what’s new and what you want to take advantage of and how you want to refactor your application to deliver on that. This one is a bit like under the hood. So kind of like we’re replacing the engine, but the car is going to drive the same and that’s the idea. So as Ron said, if you stuck close to the standard components that we ship, we’ll do all the work for you. And it really should be a seamless upgrade. There is the opportunity always to do custom stuff in serve way. We like to have an open architecture and the folks that usually take advantage of that understand that they’ll have to kind of bring their own stuff along and we can help with that as well. When the time comes to sort of publish how to migrate your stuff. Yep. Cool. Okay. I got somebody that’s asking a very naughty question if you ask me. I hope you guys are ready for this. Why did you guys not move to react? Shall I answer that one? Good luck. No, it’s a good question and it’s maybe for some people a better question. And it’s not to be to not try to answer it in detail, but by the end of the day, I think for people who choose to avoid it shouldn’t really matter. I think people who choose companies who choose to avoid want to be unburtoned and want a technology which works. And all the react is beautiful. There’s nothing wrong with the reject react. We chose something different. And I think the platform enables you with what we chose to build whatever application you want and to bring that value to your customers. And maybe maybe a couple of years ago we have that shows a different path, but that was all right too. And it’s a good point. And that’s a good point. And it’s a good point. And probably what we chose and glare. I know what we use now. Also, it is good. And yeah, the good thing is that we were able to keep what we chose. And it’s a good point. And it’s a good point. And it’s a good point. And I think what we need to do is take a look at the what we need to do. And it’s a good point. And it’s a good point. And I think that’s really what’s the most important. And power our developers and our customers to build whatever they want. Okay. And we can have a debore beer and talk about react or angular. But that’s a different discussion. I think that’s a different discussion. Yeah. I’ve got a question here about a Servoy cloud, a little bit of a logistics slash devops question, I guess. Is it available in South or Latin America, Australia and so let’s say regions beyond North America and Europe. Yes. Yes. Are we there is around the globe. Okay. And that is thanks to us. Well, we are on Amazon. Yeah. And we are able to use the Amazon data centers across the globe. But you still steer it from a central system, right? So for us, it takes serious effort to do this. But, because we have, we need a place where our app, the app cages land basically. But we are able to scale to such regions also. And we have that in production as we speak. Okay. Cool. And somebody’s asking, I’ve heard a rumor that you will drop table view forms in NG2, which would be a showstopper in our case. What’s, what’s the deal there? I can answer that one. This is, this is, obviously from a customer who is coming from older versions of Servoy. We have brought along the, these are, these are basically data grids. And we have brought those along all the way from the classic desktop client to the first generation web client to the next generation web client. In this case, the, the table view forms, I don’t think we’re going to migrate for NG2. They will run, by the way, Servoy NG1 will also run for a while. Okay. So we’re not, there’s no cliff at the end of the year, even though, support for the underlying library, AngularJS, is, is the end of, end of support at the end of this year. For us, the NG1 applications will run for, for a few years. So there’s no emergency there. At some point though, this older stuff, we can’t, we can’t move it forward. There is a lot of rich functionality, a lot of performance improvements in the, in the grid components. And there’s a way to, I think, to kind of automate the, the generation of those components from the classic table views. So if that’s also a conversation for the bar, I think, or private, private discussion or one of the tech webinars. I, I, I, we can. Sean, I think what’s good to mention that we’ve helped a lot of company of our customers migrate from smart client or classic web client to NG. And, and all of those we migrate from table view to grid components. And that’s not, that’s not a big effort. Yeah, exactly. So. All right. Next one will NG1 be deprecated anytime soon or what kind of timeline you guys have in mind. Yeah, Sean, okay, go ahead, Sean. Okay, yeah, I kind of just answered that. That’s where we won’t be deprecating it anytime soon. And we’re looking as a kind of long, long term supports. Contract for that that could, could run for I think a couple years. And so we’re kind of evaluating this as we go. And yeah, so, so. The nice thing is that your application can be deployed as NG1 or NG2, starting with this release. NG2 will be final at the end of the year. After that we will ask the community to try to move forward as quickly as possible and will make that as seamless as possible. And we’ll evaluate, I think the NG1 end of supports as we go. But we have a, we have a long term support. Available for, for NG1, for at least a year or two. Okay, the next question kind of makes me, makes me smile a little bit. So this is bringing up another question. So what is the end of life for NG2? 2026. 2026, there we go. December 15th. Who is that? Who has that question? Yeah, anonymous, it says, I don’t know. I’ll figure it out. I’ve got a lot of, I’ve got. You’re, you’re against has nobody got your year. There’s a lot of technical questions that I think we should answer on Friday. There might be one that we can make a bit more generic. So somebody’s asking is NG2 faster. Can we, can we answer that in, in a way like what, what benefits does it bring my end users as a software vendor? When I migrate to NG2, what, what, what other things can I do? Sean, you want to do that or actually time? Sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, as I said before, this is, this is more or less a non-functional, upgrade, stack, you know, under the hood type thing. There’s obvious reasons why, you know, it’s, it’s a better library. One of which is performance. So we do expect better performance. If you know anything about Angular 1 and, and, and, and, you know, Angular JS and, and Angular, which is, I know they sound the same, but they’re radically different. That, that there’s, there’s a big performance improvement there. So it won’t be slower. I can say that. The other thing is, is for our, for our own company, a Servoy R&D subparagraphing for NG2 is nicer. They get to use a, a TypeScript and I think a bit nicer for them to work. So that also applies to people who want to do custom stuff as well. I think the ability to develop custom components and integrations in the browser will be a bit nicer. But, but in terms of how, you know, you day to day usage, you shouldn’t notice much difference. Yeah. Although you say it’s not a big move, I would almost compare with. Replacing a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a traditional industry, do electric engines, right? It’s, it, we, we need to keep our infrastructure really modern. I think. And from the outside, it probably doesn’t look like a lot of value, but it’s, it is a lot of value, right? So, yeah, it’s, it depends a little bit what perspective you take. And taking these forward real, real, really help. I think. Okay. I got maybe one last one that I personally don’t understand. Will the NG2 client still use Eclipse? Or has there been any more movement or moving IDs? Yeah, it’ll still be based, based on Eclipse. Okay. Oh, the NG developers are the developer here. So, the client. Yeah, that’s the development. Okay. All right. Well, there’s tons of questions about the, the smart doc editor, and if you can save to docs, and if you can do a mail merge, and if you can do background printing, and etcetera, etcetera, people about SUI security and linked in and typescript, and why the Sean looks so good. And will my end to end test still run? I think, I think we should save most of those for, for Friday, unless you guys know why Sean looks so good. Otherwise, I think this is a wrap up. Very good job guys, especially the whole team at, at, at, serve, or in, in, in providing kind of the seamless upgrade path to NG2. And looking forward to the Friday demos and stuff. Yep. demos. demos. Okay. Okay. All right. Thanks everyone. Bye for now. Bye.

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