Last night was my second Partner Group meeting in Scotland. I have seen the delights of Aberdeen (previously I had only seen the docs and this was a very interesting perspective on life) and the joys of Glasgow - I discovered that the local offices for many businesses appear to be the SAS Radisson Hotel which USED to have free wireless.
On my 1st night we spent our time talking about the importance of training and Office and Vista. Then last night at Glasgow we spoke about training again (as QA were a guest for the night) and Security. While one person successfully tackled me on security I hope I got across the theme that security is simple if rules are followed.
To follow up on these subjects, I thought I would do a quick "David" to each area.
Many people tackle me with 2 questions on training:
- Why do I have to go get training before I sit an exam and
- Why can I not just do on the job training?
I always get a bit ratty about the 1st one as my answer is that if you know the technology enough to sit the exam without the training, then sit the exam - the pass marks are not set at the 100% level, so discovering a few small holes during the exam does no harm. However, it you are not yet skilled enough to deliver that solution - you need to get skilled and training (in its 110 various forms) is the way to do this. I don't mind if it is On The Job, e-learning, from a book, shadowing someone etc, just get the skills. The other really important piece here was that if you are going to do OTJ training - be fair to your customers and let them know.
The security piece covered off the basics - such as information that can be found at www.getsafeonline.org. The biggest criticism of this was the ease of converting this information into something a business can understand and get excited (or depressed) about and see the value. John suggested many things and they deserve a blog entry on their own to share.
As for Office and Vista - it is getting close and I hope to post next week on all the information that is out there for these at the moment.
There was one really bad point. We are currently running a couple of campaigns at the moment to drive adoption and awareness of SBS. One customer had managed to get 180 day trials of our technology and was trying to install it without help - and although they had the details of our SBSC partner, did not realise their place in helping them with this (and it not being a free support service). This we will look into internally. Honest. I did not like this bit at all :-(
The pizza has been good, but I think I might fail to fit the airplane seat when flying home tonight
ttfn
David
Posted
Thu, Mar 30 2006 7:26 AM
by
David Overton