Hello!

Because of problems like this post:
http://www.baanboard.com/node/1927

I have taken to posting on this forum, in order to find enough co-students, to have a class!

Anyone out there [in the world] interested in taking this course?

I have tried twice to get this class, and had it cancelled due to not getting enough participants (most recent message revealed this value to be three to four students!)

Here are the dates that this class is being held:

Title: ERP LN Enterprise Server Technical Administration
Cost: US $2600
September: 9-12, Dallas, TX, USA * CANCELLED *
October: 6-9, Chicago, IL, USA * CANCELLED *
October: 28-31, Alpharetta, GA, USA * CANCELLED *
November: 11-14, Toronto, Canada * !! Bought My Ticket !! * Class Moved Up to November 10-13!! It should be a Go!
December: 2-5, Dallas, TX, US
December: 16-19, Toronto, Canada
====
Course Description:
Overview
This course will prepare you to administer an ERP LN system. To proficiently administer an ERP LN system, you will identify: How the system functions via the system architecture and the processes and procedures that are necessary to administer the system.

Intended Audience: System Administrators, Database Administrators, Software Developers and any other application support personnel who will work with the technical aspects of ERP LN.

Duration: 4 days

CPE Credits: 32

Recommended Prerequisites:
Working knowledge of UNIX or Windows computer systems; comfortable operating a PC with Microsoft Windows; able to navigate through the system.
================

I am not an Infor employee trying to whip up class enrollment, I am a newb at this software, who is trying to get some training, but this company is obviously not advertising it hard enough, as we are not getting enough people in these classes. [Companies like Microsoft and Cisco are smart to offer robust training/certification programs, as technicians are more likely to recommend to use software they've had training on .... I hope that Infor learns this soon enough, and pushes their training programs harder.]

For proof of my newbness, please reference these prior posts:

BAAN IV Single Sign On Across UNIX-Windows:
http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/showthread.php?t=53283

Creating PDF Documents with Logo:
http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/showthread.php?t=44141

BAAN LN Disaster Recovery:
http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/showthread.php?t=52572

For further interest, click on my username, I've been here for 36 weeks, and this is my first asking for this kind of help [and my prior questions show that
I know nothing.]

Thanks for your help! I really need to get this training, as I want to better
use this software that my company decided to purchases, but we are
struggling to get people trained on it. [Tried to send our DBA to some Infor training last year, and the class was cancelled twice, so he never went to training.]

Apparently, the investment we made into Baan LN was substantial, but without some training, we are treading water on something that has a lot of company data inside it, which is not too wise.

If anyone knows of other training options, please let me know!

Come on now, I know that someone else in the United States would need training on this.

Title: ERP LN Enterprise Server Technical Administration
Cost: US $2600
September: 9-12, Dallas, TX, USA *CANCELLED*
October: 6-9, Chicago, IL, USA *CANCELLED*
October: 28-31, Alpharetta, GA, USA * CANCELLED*
November: 11-14, Toronto, Canada
December: 2-5, Dallas, TX, US
December: 16-19, Toronto, Canada

You'd think that if you wanted training on Infor ERP LN Enterprise Server Technical Administration, you'd be able to get it from Infor themselves ...

Instant000,

The problem you are facing is the consultants that are implementing the software are doing more of the training, instead of working with Infor Education. This is mainly due in part to Baan closing the Education divison years ago, and the consultants having to fill in. Also, the education courses are more expensive that a Knowledge Transfer that the onsite consultants are providing.

I have been playing with the idea of having online courses for several years. In January I stared my own company, and will soon offer online clases. The classes will be different than those offered by Infor. You will need your own environment to participate. This may change as I discuss opportunities with Infor, and may be able to offer a online environment to accompany the course. Technical courses will be presented first, and others will be added through the year.

Toolswizard:

Cool. Thanks.

I was wondering why ... from what I was reading on Infor's website, they were basically 'starting up" training classes, when I figured the products had been around for many years.

So ...at the merger, they stopped giving training classes? That is such a poor way to transition your product.

I can see how the consultants used this as an excellent opportunity to fill a need and make a profit from this.

Also, I can see how the consultants are probably more adept trainers, given their experience.

Thanks again for your assistance.

It was not Infor who stopped the classes. I was in Baan Education when they closed it down. There were refunding many of the classes due to the systems not staying up and running and other issues with the material. Although we overcame the system problem, the reputation of the classes caused decreased enrollment, and eventually closed it down.

The consultants are great when teaching your configured system for individual user training. You are correct, it is profit driven. Even inside Infor, instead of working as a team, they are profit centers. The consulting side competes with education.

I have worked on both sides of the debate. On the Education side, they are required to teach you everything about everyfield and must follow the material. On the Consulting side they can break away from the standard material and focus in areas of interest. It all needs to come together. I am looking forward to seeing the new material that they are currently putting together.

Sir, thank you. As a positive update, I should be going off to class next week. You can expect a full review, from my perspective.

So how was class?

So how was class?

The class was better than expected, though there was room for improvement.

I'll just look at these facets of the course, and if you want more detail, please reply.

Instructor
Student Baan Environment
Course Material
Class Length
Class Location
What I could have done to make the course better
Overall Course Grade


Instructor:
Excellent experience with Baan, through all of its iterations, has been working with the product since the early 90's. He is actually an Infor consultant, but was assigned to do the training on what appeared to be an emergency basis. The instructor was very professional, and was able to overcome any shortcomings in the training material as well as the classroom Baan environment, in order to present the material. Where applicable, the instructor could parallel real-world usage with the course material. Also, where applicable, the instructor could show how real world usage contrasts with the course material.

Student Baan Environment:
This is one area the course gets poor marks. In order to properly teach a course of this type, each student needs their own ERP/DB Server as well as their own workstation. This expectation was not met. This was also contrary to the instructor's wishes.

The environment was provided by Element K. .(They're a company that does classes like CBT's.) Each student had a login to a VMWare workstation, that was set up to connect to a SQL server that had Baan LN installed on it. The LN Server was shared amongst all students. What you are given is basically an elementk student login, which then enables you to logon to the training website. After logging on to your training environment, you launch your class [in my case, ERP LN, and connect to your VMWare workstation through a console session. Everything runs through Java via the web browser. On the final day, I shut my remote lab machine down, to see what would happen, and the interface allowed me to log into the student website and then it powered back on my virtual workstation, so it handled the shutdown process beautifully.

There were a couple places in the course material where it would reference the {bse} folder, as well as other folders on your LN server, and you'd want to look at this, to confirm what happens when you created your VRCs, or whatever else you might be doing. Well, this wasn't immediately intuitive to us, as we first had to realize the ERP LN server was shared, and also that we could access it via RDP and/or get to the directories via UNC Path/Mapped network drives. The ERP LN server was reachable via public IP address, which was discovered by pinging the elemntk.infor***.com address given in the BECS. Personally, I see this as a security risk, and to me, a more secure classroom environment would have the students logging into a private LAN environment remotely. Also, this is a performance issue (If you don't have a network background like I do, you should still be able to understand the performance example of having a conversation with someone. If this person is in the same room with you, and nearby, you will have an easy conversation. If, on the other hand, you're in one room, and the other person is in another room, you'd have a more difficult conversation. This might be an over-simplification.) Since the Virtual ERP LN server was reachable via public IP, you could connect to it from OUTSIDE the lab environment. To me, this breaks the intent of the course, as, once again, I feel each student should have their own environment that others cannot break.

Course Material:
A lot of the course material was good, so let that sink in before reading the rest of this review. For most tasks, it would give a detailed, step-by-step of how to do such-and-such task. Where available, it would also show you a shortcut, and/or quicker way to do the same task. I think it was helpful that it showed the long way first, so that you could understand what actually happens. Also, the course material often had *warning* messages, when a step was potentially destructive to data, and/or would take a long time to execute, and/or the step required exclusive access to a certain session, in order to execute it.

Of course, since the course material is kinda new, there were issues with it:
(1) Some of the material was not properly proofread, so there were some places you'd get the same instructions to do a different step or asked you to do things that did not make sense.
(2) You sometimes had to figure out what you were being asked to do.
(3) You questioned if someone actually gave the material to a neophyte, and asked them to go through the book and labs, and see if they could do everything, and/or if the material clearly explained everything.
(4) Having an experienced consultant as an instructor helped, as he beat the shortcomings of the course work. I would have hated life (being inexperienced myself) getting this class from an instructor with little experience.
(5) I feel that an alternate, configured, environment should be available to the student for each step in the course work, for in case the student goofs up on earlier labs. ... there are some things you can do in LN that could completely cripple a system ... there really is not much time for break/fix troubleshooting in the middle of a class.] I feel that if you use something like VMWare, you could make multiple versions of the student environment and server (one for each chapter). This way, mistakes won't follow the student to the next lesson.
(6) Another con to the course material is that if you specifically go to a chapter to do a task, and you look at the simplistic task steps, you might get misled. For example, if you follow the menu management plan, and you haven't created a VRC before hand, it'll get to a certain step and won't work. [Of course, if you follow the book chapter-by-chapter, you might already quickly know how to create the VRC, but, it won't be intuitive to a newbie like myself.]. Of course, a part of an overall understanding of how LN works is knowing all about packages and such, and the instructor devoted a lot of class time to this subject (I sense this is probably one of the most misunderstood parts of Baan, for him to focus on it so much.).

Class Length:
I think the class could afford to be longer, with more time spent on the web admin and packages. (Yes, I said more time on packages ... I think it's that important.)

Class Location:
I'm not sure I can gripe on this one. I was late on class the first day, so we had to play catch-up for a couple days. (First, I was using my airport directions to drive to class the first day, which had me going in the wrong direction, and Second, once I did get to the right place, I drove in circles before I could find the class site.) If you're smarter than me, if you drive up the highway a little further before getting off, you can actually see the big building with INFOR on the side of it. [I wan't that smart, unfortunately.]

What I could have done to make the course better:

I know, most people don't necessarily write reviews from this standpoint [Remember, when you point a finger at someone, there's more pointing right back at yourself.]

(1) Have a little baan experience. Considering that I have ZERO Baan experience, it was stupid to send myself to an admin course, when I don't (and probably still don't) understand the basics of what the software is trying to help me accomplish. My biggest struggle with the course was navigating through the interface. I'm not sure that the essentials course covers this aspect, but I would ask the training consultant for whichever course covered the navigation aspects, as this is one of the biggest enablers for productivity with the application.
(2) Bring questions to the class. I had only a couple specific questions, with regards to VMWare support (supported on ESX 3.5, but you can't' call them for performance problems) and licensing (SLM was explained in the class). I wish that I had asked more questions. During class, the instructor answered all of my questions. Also, the instructor gave me his email address, so that I could communicate with him directly later, as required.
(3) Don't get lost. I was late on the first day, which caused class to start a little earlier each day, to make up for it.
(4) Request local training. The travel got to me, and I was not as well rested as I wanted to be for class. [The problem is that the training can't be on company premises, as the chance of getting pulled from training to work on a minor task would be too high. Might be able to work a deal with New Horizon to use their training center in the future ... for a cost, of course ...]

Overall Course Grade: B-

There is quality material there, and much information to be gained.

PROS: The step-by-steps alone are worth their weight in gold. Be reminded though, that not everything is that simple. For example, chapter two tells you how to cook eggs. But, you don't have any eggs?! So, you have to get eggs first. The material assumes that you know to get eggs before you can cook them! (especially if egg acquisition was covered in chapter one.)

CONS: There needs to be more proofreading of the course material, and I'd recommend that someone [other than the person who makes the lab material] goes over the coursework and the lab environment, to test how well it works together.

If anyone from Infor wants to bid for my services as a course material tester, contact me!

If you have more specific questions, please ask.