Looking Back to Look Ahead

With the PROFINET class in Seattle and the PROFIBUS class in Silicon Valley we concluded our one-day training classes for 2009 this past week.  This provided a good opportunity to consider the feedback we’ve had throughout 2009 in preparation for planning 2010.

Almost everyone who attended in 2009 was already using a fieldbus, so the “Introduction to Fieldbus” section of next year’s classes will be a one-slide explanation with a link to a short webinar we’ll do in January.  Speaking of webinars, we recommend viewing our three archived Ethernet Basics webinars before attending the PROFINET class.  In Seattle one of the Course Evaluations made a good point that we’ll try to incorporate: “Shorten the length of the webinars suggested to view before the seminar to only cover the topics discussed.”

Again based on the course evaluations, we also plan to shorten the introduction and the PROFIsafe sections in both classes.  For PROFIsafe we plan a webinar for those who want to dig deeper.

Next year’s PROFIBUS classes will all cover both discrete and process automation.  For the last couple years, we’ve run a special Process class, but it was not much different from the other PROFIBUS class.  We will make it more clear that our PROFIBUS class covers both discrete and process.  One of the requests attendees at the PROFIBUS class make is for more information about PROFINET.  We’ll grant that request in 2010, too.

We will work on our one-day training class schedule in early December.  Watch the home page at www.profibus.com for a news item with schedule.  If you have an RSS news feed from our news page, you’ll get that automatically.  If you are not receiving our RSS feeds, click the RSS link on the website to learn about RSS feeds and sign up.

We really get good reviews for these classes as this sampling from Seattle shows:
“Very good class.  Good overview and not too overwhelming.”
“Good time management.”
“A great course!  Very informative.  Learned a lot about PROFINET capabilities.”
“Hunter has a nice rap.”
[Ok, I don’t know what the last one means, but the others are good.]

I’m writing this on the plane trip to Germany for the SPS/Drives Show.  I plan to Tweet about my visit to the show.  You can follow them at www.twitter.com/Chenning.  And I’ll blog about the show in more detail, probably on the trip home.

Speaking of plane trips and looking back and looking ahead, here’s an off-topic look down:
Leaving Seattle

Leaving Seattle

Grand Canyon

Getting close to home

–Carl Henning