We kind of opened the training center today. The pages are up, Google's charging us for their nice AdWords, and the announcement is set for Monday's newsletter.
Today was a bunch of emails between Andy, Brian and myself. Andy and I getting the pages setup, the schedule down, and the cart working for charges. Brian because he's teaching the class and he provided the outline and other info.
It's amazing how much work goes into getting this going. We got the PCs and Andy's been plugging them in, testing them, working on the whole imaging part. We're trying to use RIS for now, Ghost is a backup if we can't get it working. We're hoping to Virtual PC the classes, but we need to be prepared for the machines getting screwed up and being rebuilt. Especially with Internet access available for the most part.
We've debated the whole Internet thing. We don't want to be draconian with people, but I do see the argument that if your boss is paying, even if that's you, you should pay attention and not be distracted by Poker, Zuma, or any other game out there. We're thinking to have ports and wireless for personal laptops always on, but disable access from the classroom clients while class is running.
It's getting exciting, especially with our first class being on SSIS, easily the most popular feature of SQL Server 2005. I see more blogs/articles/talk about SSIS than any other topic in SS2K5. And Brian's the expert, writing a book on it with Haidong Ji, Kathi Kellenberger and a few more authors.
We hope to see you in class at some point. I may journey down for the first one to help out and see how things go.
