Avanade & Princes Trust Business Intelligence Training

During the past two weeks the company I work for was asked by the Princes Trust to provide a training course to them to explain the entire Microsoft Business Intelligence software stack. My company agreed to donate my time and a colleague’s time to put this training material together. Our remit was to provide novice to advanced training over two weeks on Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server. So basically a minimum of 8 weeks worth of training material given over 2 weeks written in just over a week – no mean feat J

Because of the worthwhile causes that the Princes Trusts supports and the fact that talking about the entire Microsoft SQL Server product family is something I love doing this was a fairly exciting but somewhat overwhelming challenge. I called in some old friends back from when I was a SQL server MVP and asked Itzik Ben-Gan and Kalen Delany if I could use some of their content to assist me in my training plan – they both very kindly agreed to let me use some of their material and Itzik sent through a large number of his books to distribute and Kalen is sending through some of her SQL Server Architecture and Metadata training DVDs. The generosity of the SQL community never fails to amaze me.

So I have just finished my part of the training and am assisting my colleague with the Sharepoint and Performance Point stuff. I’m not a official Microsoft trainer but I do love seeing people excited by SQL Server and hearing people spending their own time over the weekend downloading SQL Express on their home machines and trying out some of the labs we developed for them to further understand the product.

So I would like to thank Audrius Pranckevicius, Igal Greenberg and David Haigh from Avanade for giving their time for free - obviously at the request of Avanade J and to Marina Rumyantseva and Richard Chadwick at the Princes Trust for making the whole experience very enjoyable and rewarding.

Extra special thank to Itzik Ben-Gan, Kalen Delany for their kind offer of materials and to Tony Rogerson for validating my entire two weeks’ worth of content.

"These views are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Avanade."

http://www.princes-trust.org.uk

http://www.avanade.com