One of the focus areas of Embarcadero, besides working on RAD Studio and other products, is to improve the overall user experience. As part of this effort, we have been working to replace the old EDN (Embarcadero Developer Network) website infrastructure with a more modern and smoother experience.
The key areas we have been focusing on are the ability for customers to access the licenses registered with their accounts and download any file associated with these licenses. Keep in mind that the EDN accounts themselves are not going to change, preserving all of your histories. What we are providing is a new website replacing:
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members.embarcadero.com for creating accounts, managing the password, listing the Embarcadero licenses associated with the account
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cc.embarcadero.com for downloading registered users installation files, patches, and additional content
The new site offers the three features (accounts management, licenses, and downloads) with a unified web application and a side hamburger menu offering the three main options. The new website can be accessed at:
What is important to notice is that the site offers more data than the sites it replaces, specifically around update subscription. Each license, in fact, has an indication of the associated subscriptions and its current expiration date. Also, download permissions are separate for customers with or without an active subscription.
Quick Overview
In the rest of this blog post, I’m going to offer a quick introduction, even if the website is quite intuitive to use. This is the initial Account Info page:
The second page offers license information and allows you to group the data, sort the rows, hide individual columns, and more. The Components column lists details of the license (for example, additional products bundled with a RAD Studio license). In this screenshot I’ve disabled the Serial Number column to hide that private information:
The third page includes all of the registered users' downloads (and some public ones) that the customer is entitled to. The content and the availability of each download depends on the license (or licenses) the logged user owns. This is generally a fairly long list, again with grouping and sorting enabled:
For each entry, you can select it to see additional information (a description, the MD5 checksum) and the actual download link:
Notice that each individual download page has a unique URL, which is the address we’ll publish when referring to a specific download file.
Final Considerations
I want to mention that the new website, or web application, is built with Sencha ExtJS (another product part of the Idera Dev Tools family) and it is a nice showcase of what is possible to achieve with this JavaScript library and its grid component. The pages that display a grid can be configured in many ways, using the local grid menu as in the picture below for the downloads page:
We do have many other enhancements under development that will further improve the user experience of this customer portal site.
A final note. We are currently planning to keep the older websites (members and cc) active for some more months, but would eventually disable them to focus only on my.embarcadero.com as the customer portal.