Cincom Smalltalk Digest: November Edition

Welcome to the November 2023 edition of the Cincom Smalltalk Digest. In this month’s newsletter, you will find the following:

CUSTOMERS and PARTNERS

• Maximizing the Year-End Budget: Why Investing in Cincom Smalltalk Is a Smart Choice

• How Simple Is It to Submit a New Cincom Smalltalk Support Case?

• A Word of Thanks from Our Engineering and Support Team

BEGINNERS and DEVELOPERS

• Navigating Business Risk: The Ultimate Responsibility of Decision-Makers

• Recommendation: Using Cincom Smalltalk as a Low-Risk, High-Value Development Tool

• Is It Time to Evaluate Commercial Smalltalk for Yourself?

• What Is Product Management’s Favorite Hidden Gem for 2023?

CUSTOMERS and PARTNERS

Maximizing the Year-End Budget: Why Investing in Cincom Smalltalk Is a Smart Choice

As the year-end approaches, it’s crucial to make the most of your remaining annual budget before it expires. Businesses always look to improve their bottom line. For many, unused budget from the current year could get left off the books in the next. Not spending those valuable dollars this year may prevent you from having them available in the future for new projects.

This “use it or lose it” concept highlights the importance of strategically investing your remaining budget in valuable purchases that can propel your business forward. Seizing that opportunity, you could spend your year-end budget on valuable Cincom Smalltalk services such as:

• Product Upgrades
• Mentoring
• Troubleshooting
• Performance Enhancements
• Migrations
• Proofs of Concept

Cincom Smalltalk Services offerings are tailored to meet the needs of businesses like yours. Don’t let your budget go to waste. Take advantage of this opportunity to make a smart investment that will propel your organization into the year ahead.

Time is money! Reach out to the Cincom Smalltalk Product Team.

How Simple Is It to Submit a New Cincom Smalltalk Support Case?

Looking to submit a new case to Cincom Smalltalk Support? It’s this simple:

• VISIT: Cincom SupportWeb® for immediate support.
• EMAIL: HelpNA@cincom.com and EuroTSC@cincom.com to file new support cases.

Additionally, these links can be helpful with the submission process and finding out more information:

• VIEW: Cincom Support Levels
• REVIEW: Cincom Smalltalk Resolutions Portal

If you have any questions or comments, reach out to the Cincom Smalltalk Product Team at CSSTARTeam@cincom.com.

A Word of Thanks from Our Engineering and Support Team

Feedback on how we may improve our products is much appreciated. Having your thoughts on hand allows us to find and address problems, which in turn benefits all users. Our products perform at their best when we incorporate customers and partners like you in the development process. When developers, users, and Cincom collaborate successfully, this helps us make the best product decisions and develop better software.

The feedback you provide is invaluable to product management, our engineering, and our customer support teams. Your insight helps us to meet your needs better, improve our products, and increase your customer satisfaction. Thank you!

BEGINNERS and DEVELOPERS

Here you can find informative articles and see specific Smalltalk examples for learning new skills or enhancing existing skills using Cincom Smalltalk.

Navigating Business Risk: The Ultimate Responsibility of  Decision-Makers

In the ever-evolving landscape of business, risk management stands as a critical junction for business leaders to navigate. Each decision made has the potential to steer a company towards prosperity or plunge it into uncertainty. As decision-makers, they bear the weight of responsibility for the livelihoods of their shareholders and their respected families. A single misstep can result in a domino effect, leading to the loss of revenue, resources, personnel, and even the ultimate failure of the business. It is imperative that business leaders understand the magnitude of the risks they face and make informed choices to ensure sustainable success.

In today’s dynamic business landscape, the challenge lies in propelling companies forward while minimizing risk. This delicate balancing act requires a deep understanding of market dynamics, consumer behavior, and emerging trends. Decision-makers must keep a finger on the pulse of their industries, embracing innovation while mitigating potential pitfalls. By fostering a culture of calculated risk-taking and empowering their teams to think creatively, they can position their organizations for sustainable growth.

In today’s market, competition has never been fiercer. To survive and thrive, businesses must constantly adapt, innovate, and stay ahead of the curve. The pressure to deliver results while managing risk can be immense. Check out this research:

• In “The State of Organizations 2023,” McKinsey & Company reveals that 78% of business leaders consider staying competitive as their top concern.
• According to the Journal of Risk and Financial Management 2023 article, “The Impact of Effective Risk Management on Financial Loss Reduction,” effective risk-management practices can reduce the likelihood of financial loss by 30%.
• Harvard Business Review recently highlighted in “The Link Between Risk Management and Organizational Performance” that companies that prioritize risk management outperform their peers by 25%.
• Additionally, the Journal of Strategic Risk Management reveals in “Building Resilience Through Strategic Risk Management” that organizations that embrace a risk-aware culture are more agile and adaptable, enabling them to respond effectively to market disruptions.

These findings underscore the vital role of risk management in driving sustainable success.

As business leaders, the responsibility to manage risk lies at the core of decision-making processes because the consequences of a single bad decision can be immense. It is imperative that leaders prioritize effective risk management so they can mitigate potential risks, seize opportunities, and lead their organizations towards a future of sustainable growth.

Recommendation: Using Cincom Smalltalk as a Low-Risk, High-Value Development Tool

Cincom is a market leader in commercial Smalltalk. Whatever type of application is required, the Cincom Smalltalk suite of tools assists users in creating value with the least amount of risk and the quickest return on investment.

What provides the high value of Smalltalk? Being a long-time Smalltalker, Arden Thomas, the Product Manager for Cincom Smalltalk, says:

“Smalltalk had a massive research and development investment in time, iterations and careful development, to create a language that is easier to use and understand. Smalltalk generally allows solving a problem more succinctly and clearly, which allows less code to solve a problem.

“Less and clearer code is easier to understand and maintain, and costs less over the life cycle of a software application. The research and development investment in Smalltalk is likely unrivaled by any other language.”

To give an illustration of this, Arden provides this quote and explanation:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”
– Benjamin Graham

Arden loves this quote because it gives a great analogy for why Smalltalk is still successful and will continue to be used in application development well into the future. In the quote, Graham relates the short term of the stock market to be like a popularity contest. The price of stocks could rapidly change, while the value of the stock remains the same. This could be from traders coming in and moving the market, the stock being manipulated in the short term or people simply chasing fads.

In the long term, the market tends to gain value due to economic growth and other factors, similar to a weighing machine. Measuring stocks over longer periods of time weeds out the fads, leaving the actual price of the stock and reflecting the true value of the company. Investors should always avoid moving on short-term fads. Eventually these fads fade, and the true value of the stock is what remains.

The same holds true for Smalltalk. Over time, even though challenged by many other languages, the productivity and value of Smalltalk wins out.

Is It Time to Evaluate Commercial Smalltalk for Yourself?

The assessment and evaluation of commercial Smalltalk is the primary focus of the Cincom Smalltalk Personal Use License (CST PUL). This version of Cincom Smalltalk is offered for personal use and is geared for people who are new to Cincom Smalltalk and are interested in discovering whether it is suitable for their application development requirements. The current version of the CST PUL is made up of a pair of distinct components: Cincom® ObjectStudio® and Cincom® VisualWorks®.

The availability of the current commercial version (Cincom Smalltalk 9.3.1) is limited exclusively to existing customers and partners. If your development needs require the most recent 9.3.1 version, please contact the Cincom Smalltalk STAR Team. We will connect you with the right salesperson to ensure that you purchase the license option that fits your needs.

To get started on your journey in commercial Smalltalk or to evaluate it for your business application needs, click here.

What Is Product Management’s Favorite Hidden Gem for 2023?

“It was hard picking a favorite because hidden gems are all based on topics that I think are valuable and useful. After looking them over, my vote for favorite for this year is Tabs: It’s Nothing, It’s Everything.” – Arden Thomas, Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager

This screencast introduced a brand-new Cincom Smalltalk 9.3 product improvement and discussed how one new feature can make a significant improvement in your daily use of Smalltalk. This product enhancement makes the most productive programming language even more productive and we discussed how one new feature can make a significant improvement in our customers’ and partners’ daily use of Smalltalk.

The Hidden Gems screencast series is well known to long-time readers of the Cincom Smalltalk Digest. Those who are new to Smalltalk or Cincom Smalltalk may be unaware of what this series is or how it can benefit their developer path. These screencasts were created to share shortcuts, tips and techniques that may help others learn or get started with Cincom Smalltalk. These specialized product tutorials uniquely share new ways to use various Cincom Smalltalk components, as well as features that might be considered “hidden gems” for productivity.

To learn more about the Hidden Gems Screencast series, check out these links:

• What Is the Hidden Gems Screencast Series and Why Is It Valuable?
• What Are the Benefits of Hidden Gems?
• Tools Series – Explores some tools and product features that developers should find useful. 
• Techniques Series – Shows various techniques of how to accomplish or solve different tasks such as automating image build and creating a custom parser. 
• ValueModel Series – Shows the principles, capabilities and use of the powerful ValueModel framework.
• DomainMaster Series – Introduces an application framework that leverages the principles of the ValueModel to make application development easier, faster, capable and reliable.  
• Persistence Series – Shows multiple techniques of how to save and load objects to disk, where using a full database might be overkill or unwieldy.
• Collections Series – Shows some lesser-known collections that may be beneficial for your collections toolbox.