Time to get Trained! Calendar for USA 2013

From the Information Injection Dept. It’s my pleasure to present to you the calendars for 2013 RES certification training events in the United States. This time around we are only scheduling classes until end of second quarter. I plan to publish the calendar for the rest of the year around end of Q1. The reason for this is that we are in the process of redesigning the training materials and the curriculum for the big training courses. This is specifically the case for Workspace Manager:

So far the training material was structured according to the 3 product editions;  Personalization and Composition, Advanced Administration and Security and Performance. While this initially seemed a good idea, experience and feedback from all you, our course participants, told us that we needed to re-arrange things a bit. In other words, few people were interested in just learning about the features in one edition – it turned out that all of you wanted the full enchilada! While we are stoked by this, it was also a challenge, since Workspace Manager today is packed chock-full of goodness;  to a degree where it has become hard to cover everything in-depth in the regular 5 days. Add to the equation that consultant managers already were challenged to pulling billable feet off the street for an entire work week, it was clear that something had to change. So that’s precisely what we are doing now:

The bottom line is that later this year we are splitting up the WM courseware into two seperate courses: Workspace Manager Basic and Advanced. Each of these courses will eventually be 3 days, making it more easy on the schedule of the participants. I anticipate we will be ready with the new courses by end of Q2, so in the meantime it’s business as usual, with one slight change: Instead of the 5 days we did all 2012, we now offer the Workspace Manager class in 4 days, as a preamble to the above mentioned changes.

Below is the schedule for the RES partner certification classes for first half of 2013. The course abreviations are as follows: WM = RES Workspace Manager, AM = RES Automation Manager, SO = Service Orchestration (soon to be known as the IT Service Store)

As you may have heard, in 2012 RES Americas appointed and signed the first RES Authorized Learning Center (or RALC) in the United States. We are proud to partner with VDX out of New Jersey. They will be selling RES training classes nationwide to end-user customers, while we here at RES continue to offer training to new and existing partners. Below is VDX’s training calendar for first half of 2013:

Just to be clear, the difference between the certification classes that RES conducts and the classes our global RALC partners offers is that the RES classes are offered free of charge (for now) to new and prospective RES partners only as a part of our ongoing investment in building out the US channel. Besides, for partners above bronze level there is a mandatory certification requirement.

• If you are a new, existing or prospective RES Partner and have interest in training, please contact yours truly.
• If you are a US RES customer interested in attending RES Workspace Manager, please contact Mr. David Ball at VDX.

For more in-depth information about the RES classes in general, see What a training class is supposed to be like. Also, make sure you have a look at the official curriculum on the RES corp web. Finally I have written a training and certification FAQ available here.

What a training class is supposed to be like

By Max Ranzau

From the Industrial Might and Logic Dept. This article is a revamp of a piece I wrote last year, in connection with the 2012 partner training calendar. As there’s going to be a new training calendar every year, it made sense to split this content into a separate article. The 2013 calendar is now online, available here. If you haven’t read this article before, here’s the exec summary: It basically describes my point of view how a technical training class should be conducted and thus how I run my mine. Even if you’re not a trainer, but a prospective participant, you may consider using my points below as a yardstick to measure the quality of another class you participate in.

Looking back over a couple of decades of working in IT, I believe my particular take on training methodology stems back from the fact that my first training class back in the mid-90′s sucked harder than a diesel powered vaccum cleaner. My students were well-justified being anything but kind in their review. Hey, so we all had to start somewhere, but moving up and onwards from there and becoming a better trainer is a continuing effort on multiple fronts:

• Knowing your target material (obviously)
• Constantly improving your delivery methods.
• Never be ignorant of the fact that even though you teach for a living, there is always someone smarter out there who you can learn from as well.

As an example of the latter, I remember (after teaching 2-3 years of Citrix WinFrame) being sent on a mandatory NT4 Terminal Server course. Taking into consideration that “thin client/server computing” (yeah, that’s what we called it back then) was still a fairly new thing, the poor sod assigned to teach the class was indeed an MCT, but his speciality was MS Office (!). Go figure how that went… The guy was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, having no clue whatsoever to what he was teaching, beyond what was on the current page of the book. However, soon finding out that myself and a colleague were knowledgeable in the subject, he ended up turning over the reins, thus doing the smart thing to ensure the participants got a good experience and their moneys worth. I think the morale of the story here is that getting egg on your face is also a learning experience. I know I’ve got enough already for an omelette or two! ;-)

Now, let’s talk about the RES certification classes. If you’ve never sat through a RES partner training class, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. These classes are very heavy on practical labwork rather than the usual PowerPoint + 15 steps of predictable labwork. With the above experiences in mind, having trained a slew of technologies over the last 20+ years, including Citrix, RES, App-V and Packeteer, I’ve formulated what I believe to be a good recipe, resonating well with most participants:

• Get the basic theory of operations
• See how it’s done
• Try to build it yourself
• Possibly fail. Don’t panic! This is a good thing. See below.
• Fix the problem and learn from the experience
• Repeat on a new topic.

The failure part at first seem to worry some folks in the modern business culture which seems predominant, being spewed and enforced by some clueless managers that “failure isn’t an option“. You, as an engineer or an admin, got to look at it with better eyes than that, because that’s how we learn best as Human Beings. Somehow we seem to forgotten this basic rule of human nature in the ruthless corporate world we inhabit as IT people. Pause and think back for a moment: It is likely that ever last one of us as a youngster , learned the hard way a stove is indeed hot!  – All because we were unable to absorb the experience of the senior people in the household.

In a much too typical IT class, you watch the numbnut at the whiteboard yammer on for 1-2 hours, showing off his Powerpoint skills, while reading aloud from the curriculum, followed by; “So, let’s turn to Lab Excersize 23A on page 451 and take 15 minutes to complete this lab”. This is where you with 98.2% probability will see the Instructor bolting for the door to answer voicemail or go on his smokebreak. You as a participant, in the meantime get the sheer thrill of following 15-20 lab steps: Click here, now click there etc. etc…Done. My question to you at this point is – and think hard about this one for a minute:

What. Did. You. Learn ?

Did said lab exercise provide you with the opportunity for independent thought or ideas? Did it expose any weaknesses in the procedure (or god forbid, in the product!) which would help you in the field later? Did you get the chance to fail, fix and learn from the experience? If the answer is no to all of the above, you have to ask yourself if you feel properly prepared. After all, chances are that your employer is not pulling you from the field, just to enjoy the nice catering and my lame Chuck Norris jokes during class.

When dealing with potent and extremely versatile products – such as the ones RES Software produces – a different approach is needed as described above. Setting you up for potential failure during class will help you avoid making similar mistakes when in front of your customer. It’s as simple as that. Being thrown into the deep end of the pool is not a bad thing, as long as there’s a qualified lifeguard on duty. What that translates to is that during my classes you can expect to be challenged, but at the same time fully supported.

Besides the full technical certification classes, run by yours truly in the Americas and my  partner-in-crime Rob de Korte in Europe, I also would like to clarify some of the other educational options available to you. As you can see from the RES corp website, we have several ways, as one of my students once put it ; “Of Injecting Information Into Your Brain”  :-)

Allow me to describe these for you, so you can get a better idea what works for you:

• Online Learning AKA Tutorials. This is your one-stop shop for self-paced learning of the RES product suite. The Online learning portal is basically just a front-end for the evergrowing number of videos which have been posted to the RES Tutorials Youtube channel. While of course there is nothing to prevent you from viewing them there directly, the portal offers you the ability to track what videos you have watched and also gives you a few review questions, just to help you verify you understood the subject of a given video.
• Virtual Workshops. These workshops are scheduled at regular intervals via GotoWebinar. The classes are mainly run by the RES Support staff, hence you will be with some of the most experienced RES troubleshooters on the planet. The online workshops are targeted at experienced admins and integrators of RES products, where we focus on a specific technology topic. The online workshops typically run for 3 hours and are scheduled at friendly times for both Americas and Europe. Previous workshops have been recorded and I hope to be able to publish them later, but I’m told they are currently being checked for technical consistency and quality.
• Self Study kit:. These documents help you prepare for the Prometric certification exams. The selfstudy kits are found under the download section of the support portal. You do not need a portal account to download these items. There are currently selfstudy kits available for WM and AM. See the screenshot on the right where to locate them.
• Admin Guides: While RES does not provide PDF’s of the courseware books for the certification training classes (neither does Citrix, MS or most other vendors for that matter), we have other very useful documents for you to download. If you for one reason or another are unable to participate in a class, you can actually learn a lot by studying the Administrative Guides for our products. These are found on the support portal as well. Look for Technical Product Documentation in the download tree. Direct links here: AM, WM.
• Demo Jumpstart: While I’m not sure these have an official title just yet, this is what I choose to call them for now. As we speak, work is being done on putting together a short event, where the focus is on the technical sale and product demonstration. The target of these classes are people who need to know enough how to demo the product and give an overview of the technology. It is my understanding that this will be a one day event. Mind you, the certification classes and these workshops are not a replacement for each other. The jumpstart is essentially focused on how to sell and demo, which we don’t really focus that much on in the full certification class, as we dig wide and deep into the technology, how it works and how it should be implemented and used. If you are an integrator planning to demo, sell and build on your own, I recommend you look into sending people to both.

Regardless of what path you chose to get started or continuing your education within RES technology, we look forward to working with you and I personally look forward to seeing you in my classes. For more information on the classes and a handy training and FAQ on the Prometric certification, see this article.

RES Partner Training 2012

ATTENTION: The training 2012 year is now over. Please refer to the 2013 training calendar.

From the Get-Yerself-Certified Dept. As the year is drawing to a close, it’s my pleasure to share with you the partner training calendar for the United States, 2012. We’ll be hosting a number of classes where you can learn the nuts & bolts of the RES product line, from the ground up. The classes will primarily be run by yours truly in 2012. According to the wishes of existing and new RES partners, we’ve selected a number of US cities where technical training will take place. Mark down the dates and contact me if you want to reserve a seat. Registered participants will receive information about the venues, prerequisites and everything else, when time is approaching. Read more »

Get AM and WM trained in Ft. Lauderdale / November

From the RES Tech Training Dept. Are you a new or prospective RES partner in the United States? Need to get trained in a RES product? Missed the recent invite? Then keep reading, this article is for you then!

Read more »

VDX Online Test Drive

Today, I have an exciting new online tool to announce to you. RES Customers and partners can now try RES VDX in an free cloud-based test environment . This online testdrive site allows users to evaluate the capabilities of RES Virtual Desktop Extender with their own computer as a remote desktop client. If you are new to the whole VDX thing, go have a look at this article. In order to try it, a couple of things are needed:

• On the testdrive landing page you’ll need to enter your contact details. An email with a link will be sent to the address you provide.
• You need IE6 for this service (Sorry, it seems the launch interface from Runaware.com does not support FireFox or Chrome at the moment)
• If you don’t have it already, install the Citrix ICA Client plugin.
• Last but not least, install the VDX client plugin. Both plugins are available for download on the demo page also.

In essence with this testdrive option, users can try RES VDX, allowing users to evaluate the product in a sandbox environment in the cloud. This makes evaluating our software faster and easier. I’m told that if this online test drive is successful, we will create online test drives for our other products as well, so be sure to give the good folks of Product Management some good feedback on this! Once you’re logged in, follow the onsite tutorial instructions to take VDX for a spin.

The registration form for the Online Test Drive can be found here. Enjoy!

Presenting RES Online Learning

From the selfstudy dept. Last week RES Software opened up a brand new website, RES Online Learning, which will help you both get started with RES technology. The site consists of A LOT of video material that will let you learn in more detail how to wrangle both the RES Workspace Manager and RES Automation Manager. All the videos are posted on a dedicated YouTube channel, but I highly recommend using the Online Learning website, where you can track your own progress as you work through the material. As of now there are 60+ videos to chomp through. The site is free to use and can be found at tutorials.ressoftware.com.