Personal Mentoring
Personal Mentoring offers intensive, individualized or small group instruction, along with on-the-job coaching to help you quickly and effectively apply new skills to the workplace. Our clients often request instructor mentoring as a follow-up to classroom training or as a stand alone solution to teach a specific skill. All mentoring services are customized to fit the client’s need and environment.
Designed for Quick Results
With Personal Mentoring, you get an instructor at your site to help you apply skills to the project you are working on. You'll get fast, targeted results—the kind of edge you can only get from expert personal support.
- Use it for a single day or multiple days
- Customize it for an individual employee's needs or structure it as small-group support
- Schedule it before or after on-site training, or to support independent off-site training
Choose from one of our popular offerings listed below or
contact us today to build a customized solution. Please note that the list below is just a sampling of the mentoring services we can provide. We are able to provide mentoring around many topics and technologies. To identify and determine the exact mentoring need, we typically schedule a conference call with a mentor and the client.
Sample Personal Mentoring Offerings
PowerShell
Leveraging PowerShell with Your Current VBScripts
Have you heard of PowerShell? Did you take the exclusive New Horizons of Minnesota PowerShell class and are now back at work wondering "now what?" Well, how about taking this custom mentoring solution where you and the instructor can look at your existing VBScirpts and leverage PowerShell to make the scripts easier to work with and much more efficient. You will also learn how to convert your existing batch file or Perl Scripts. Existing VBScript and PowerShell knowledge are required.
Personal mentor: Matthew Obert
SharePoint
Automating InfoPath Forms with SharePoint Designer and SharePoint
Do you have a need to automate your InfoPath forms with SharePoint? Workflows are the rage so how can you make the most of your SharePoint site to minimize administration? With mentoring on InfoPath, SharePoint Designer and SharePoint, we can help you create your InfoPath forms and automate them from within InfoPath. We can assist you with creating connections to your databases and document libraries and then deploy them using SharePoint. We'll help you build workflows to have them approved or moved to the appropriate locations. Unlike class, where you have limited opportunities to ask specific questions about your site or process, this is a one on one session to help with your project.
Personal mentor: Don Donais
.NET
.NET Cafeteria
You are a .NET developer with a range of skills, but you also have some gaps in your knowledge. You don’t have time for a full five-day class, and even if you did, you find that a good deal of the content covers topics in which you are already skilled. Why can’t you just put together a training session on specifics? Well, actually you can. We can work with you to pick and choose content from any and all of our current offerings to create a one or two-day custom solution. Typically, a .NET class covers three chapters of material each day. You can design your training to go deeper into a few specific areas or to move at a faster pace and cover more content—content to meet your needs.
Personal mentor: Brian Lockwood
Operations Manager 2007
Working with Operations Manager 2007
Operations Manager 2007 provides a robust environment for monitoring your Window environment. But without additional customization after your initial implementation, you can be overwhelmed by the number of alerts that are being generated by the management packs you've implemented. We can help you understand why these alerts are being generated and how to make adjustments to your environment to better tune the management packs for your specific implementation.
Personal mentor: Lu Patrick
Windows Server
Implementing an Active Directory Integrated [Digital] Certificate Infrastructure (Windows 2003 or 2008)
Many Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies are now requiring the use of digital certificates for a product to work. If you are going to implement a public key infrastructure (PKI) inside your organization, there are many gotchas and best practices that need to be considered, especially if you have compliance standards such as PCI, HIPPA or Sarbanes-Oxley. We can have one of our instructors assist you in designing a new PKI environment or help plan a migration to Windows 2008 Active Directory Certificate Services. The following technologies use or require PKI: Encrypted File System, BitLocker, Office Communication Server, Exchange (for secure messaging), SSL, Federated Services, SQL, SCOM, SCCM, Network Access Protection, Terminal Services Gateway Services and many more.
Personal mentor: Bob Krone
SQL Server
Learn SQL Server Performance Measurement, Monitoring and Troubleshooting
Are you experiencing long report rendering times or slowdowns in your OLTP applications? Do you have a plan to monitor and prevent unacceptable response times from your SQL Server? If you want to know what is going on with SQL Server and what you can do to prevent performance issues, then this mentoring solution is for you. At the completion of this mentoring, you will:
- Learn the tools for troubleshooting SQL Server response times.
- Develop strategies and techniques to monitor and measure SQL Server performance.
- Develop a plan to prevent future issues.
Personal mentor: John Thurow Create SQL Server Maintenance Plans
Are you confident that your SQL Server databases are properly backed up and being maintained for optimum performance? Are you sure that you can restore your databases from existing backups? Do you have the peace of mind that your SQL Server maintenance is being done according to the industry’s best practices? If you answered "no" to any of these questions, then this mentoring is your answer. You will:
- Use the Maintenance Plan Wizard and Design Surface to create and modify SQL Server maintenance plans.
- Analyze your needs and determine which database backup/restore strategy is appropriate and then create a corresponding maintenance plan.
- Create maintenance plans for other purposes such as index rebuilding and statistics updating.
- Use database restore methods.
Personal mentor: John Thurow Analyze Your SQL Server Security and Implement Solutions
Are you confident that your SQL Server is configured according to the best security practices? Is your data safe from unwanted access? How do you know who did what with your data? You need to arm yourself with information to combat the unwanted prying eyes and the bad guys. With this mentoring you will learn:
- The SQL Server security model.
- SQL Server auditing methods.
- How to analyze your present SQL Server security configuration. Please note that your application’s security and design may be difficult to reverse engineer.
Personal mentor: John Thurow Automate Your SQL Server with Jobs and Alerts
Do you want to make your SQL Server administration easier so that you can have a life? Do you want time away from SQL Server to free up extra time for other tasks? Do you know SQL Server is having issues before the end users tell you? Can the SQL Server problems correct themselves? The answers to these concerns involve jobs and alerts. This mentoring helps you with:
- Identifying the area's jobs and alerts.
- Creating jobs for specific tasks and automating them.
- Creating alerts to notify you of SQL issues.
- Use alerts to take corrective action.
Personal mentor: John Thurow Implement Database Mirroring for High Availability
Is your data safe from destruction? Would a restore from backup take too long? How long can your organization be without data? To address these losses of service concerns, you may need to implement a SQL Server high availability solution like database mirroring. This mentoring solution addresses the implementation of database mirroring. You will:
- Learn the three modes of database mirroring and choose the one that best fits your environment and needs.
- Learn how to implement database mirroring.
- Learn how to monitor database mirroring.
- Practice failing over to the database mirror and failing back.
- Use the database mirror as a source for reporting.
Personal mentor: John Thurow
Features of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook
You use the Microsoft Application Suite but you know there’s a way to use it more efficiently. Have you ever had any of the following questions run through your mind or as you’re shouting over the cube to your co-workers? There’s got to be an easier way to sort on multiple criteria. How can I filter my 5000 row spreadsheet quickly? How can I pull data from other spreadsheets into my current spreadsheet quickly and more efficiently? Can I perform calculations across multiple spreadsheets or even workbooks? How can I sort a table I’ve set up in Word? Need to insert charts into your Word document? Putting together a Word document with pictures and need the pictures to align with the text properly? Are those mail merges a terrifying experience every time you create one? Need to create your own template in Power Point instead of tweaking someone else’s? How can I use the Scheduling Assistant in Outlook to make scheduling a meeting less painful? It’s no secret the Microsoft Application Suite can do all this and more; making your life more streamlined. You don’t know what you don’t know. So, let our mentors help you answer these questions and more.
Personal mentor: Gail Sterr
Adobe
Sudden Designer
Do you find yourself suddenly in the role of designer, without the benefit of formal design training? Creating quality collateral for your company is something you want to be good at, but right now it’s all you can do to make your way through Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop! This mentoring session briefs you on some of the most important design considerations, such as:
- Concept
- Thumbnails
- Visual hierarchy
- Rule of Threes
- Elements of design
Personal mentor: John Buck InDesign Basics
Learned Adobe InDesign but now aren’t sure how that flyer or brochure should go together? This mentoring session covers the following basics of this powerful layout software:
- Master pages
- Font treatments
- Color considerations
- Inserting photos and other graphics
- Final touches
Personal mentor: John Buck Font Treatments in Illustrator:
Adobe Illustrator’s font treatment features are fun and fantastic. Make so much more of your design work by utilizing these techniques and filters as they apply specifically to typographic elements. This mentoring session gives you hands-on experience, limited only by your imagination.
Personal mentor: John Buck Photoshop Basics
Learned Adobe Photoshop but aren’t sure which of the correction tools to use, or even how to use them? This mentoring session covers the pros and cons of these Photoshop features such as history brush, clone stamp, healing brush, Dust and scratches filter, red eye correction and sharpening.
Personal mentor: John Buck
Professional Business Skills
Presentation Skills
Good at putting impressive Power Points together, but not so great at presenting? Successful presentations need both elements: a good slide show and a good speaker. This mentoring session will help you overcome many of the common public speaking woes:
- Planning the presentation
- Presentation style
- Nervousness or fear of public speaking
- Establishing credibility as a speaker
- Getting and maintaining audience interest
- Handling question-and-answer sessions
- Leaving a lasting impression with audience
Personal mentor: Helen Krone
System Center
Deploying Applications with System Center Configuration Manager 2007
Now that you have your ConfigManager environment running it's time to put it to use. You understand the concepts around deploying applications but could use some help in creating query-based collections to fine-tune your application deployments. Your responsibilities include tracking and troubleshooting those deployments. With a mentoring session, you can have one of our instructors come to your location and help you better understand how to target the right machines, leverage the capabilities of software distribution, and use available tools for resolving issues.
Personal mentor: Lu Patrick Deploying Operating Systems with System Center Configuration Manager 2007
It all seemed so easy in class but now you're faced with creating image files, adding customizations and targeting the right configuration to the right machine! You know OSD can do a lot more than drop an image on a system and want to explore the additional capabilities. With one of our instructors by your side, helping you work through an operating system deployment in your environment, we can help tie the theory to practical application.
Personal mentor: Lu Patrick Automating Processes with SMS or SCCM
Do you work with SMS or SCCM? Do you want to learn how to automate some of the processes? How about extending the console with custom actions? If you know VBScript then this mentoring solution is for you. In this solution you will be guided through using VBScript to leverage WMI actions. You will then learn how to create your own custom actions and add them to the SMS or SCCM console. But wait...there's more. How about using PowerShell instead of VBScript?
Personal mentor: Matthew Obert and
Lu Patrick Creating Custom Web Reports for SMS or SCCM
Are you tasked with getting information out of the SMS or SCCM database? Do you want to create custom web reports to display custom inventory information? If so, then this mentoring solution is for you. In this session you will learn how to create custom SQL Views in the SMS or SCCM database. You will then learn how to leverage those views in the SMS or SCCM web reporting feature. How about linking this new report to other reports (custom or pre-built) or even creating graphs and charts?
Personal mentor: Matthew Obert