SAPIEN Technologies

I’ve just come back from a week in London (rain, rain, rain, rain, rain) delivering PowerShell training to a large investment banking firm in the UK. The class was brokered by Pygmalion, a London-based Microsoft Certified Gold Partner that offers both training and consulting services. Some of Pygmalion’s trainers attended the course, and they’re well qualified to start offering classes… with a public schedule beginning in October (which is nice, because I’m ont flying back to Londond soon – lovely city, but horrible airport – I wound up spending the night in Newark NJ on the way home, which was not part of the original plan).

What’s realy delightful about Pygmalion is that they really “get it” when it comes to PowerShell. Administrators “get” PowerShell pretty quickly – show them a one-liner like Gwmi Win32_Service | Where { $_.StartMode -eq “Automatic” -and -not $_.Started } | ConvertTo-HTML | Out-File c:\notrunning.html and the value of PowerShell starts to become pretty obvious (BTW, that one-line gets you an HTML report of services which probably should be running on a server, but aren’t). But salespeople and other “non geeks” are often slow to grasp the import of PowerShell – but not the folks at Pygmalion! I did a couple of half-day seminars to introduce PowerShell to local IT pros (thanks to everyone who attended), and it’s clear that the folks in the UK – at least Pygmalion’s customers – really understand the value of PowerShell. We moved past the “why should I care” stage in about five minutes and were talking about best practices, what might be on the horizon for v2, how PowerShell’s already finding a home in Exchange 2007, and so forth – in other words, everyone was convinced of the shell’s value from the outset, and just wanted to dig deeper into details from that point.

If you’re located in or around London, give Pygmalion a call and sign up for a 2-day PowerShell course. We’re busy talking to other training firms in the EMEA region (see www.ScriptingTraining.com for information on other partners, including those in the US, who are offering our training),  but it’s nice to see companies like Pygmalion jumping right into this leading-edge technology, immediately understanding its value to companies and administrators, and having trainers who really understand this technology right to its core.

Perhaps even more amazing was the customer I was delivering training to. These guys GET IT big-time. We had scarcely cleared “what are cmdlets?” when they wanted to know how the formatting subsystem works, how the type extensions could be used, and more. They were a smart bunch, and almost as obssessed with PowerShell as I am. Almost, in fact, as obssessed with PowerShell (dare I say it) as architect Jeffrey Snover. Yikes! It was a bit scary to be in the room with them as they definitely tested the limits of my knowledge, but it was also exciting and challenging. Again, they “get” the value of the shell immediately, and are already pushing the limits of what v1.0 can do. And folks, this is just seven months after the shell officially shipped! VBScript took years for that to happen – clearly, there’s something special about this shell.

Do you know of a training company who “gets it” when it comes to PowerShell? Drop me a line at don (at) sapien (dot) com if you do – I’d love to talk with them about their viewpoint and experiences, and we’re always looking for folks interesting in offering PowerShell training. 

Cheers,
Don

(BTW… I’m writing this from the Continental President’s Club in Newark… thanks so much to Continental for understanding the value of free Wi-Fi to their business customers. I’m not thrilled at having had to spend the night and morning in Newark – which may be nice, but it’s not home – but the delay was Virgin Atlantic’s fault and Continental accepted full responsibility for their codeshare partner’s failing – thanks, guys.)

(And another BTW… thanks to all the students who’ve taken our PowerShell training to date. Due to all their feedback, we’re making a lot of minor revisions to the 2-day “intro” course, and will be shipping a 1-day “intermediate” and 2-day “advanced” course toward the end of 2007. Keep yer eyes glued to this blog for all the details when they’re available.)