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…it’s Wednesday night. <insert pratfall here> On second thought, there’s no need for the pratfall. We’ve had a good couple days here in Oregon. [If you missed the obscure SNL reference, click here.] The PROFINET one-day training event on Tuesday went very well especially considering that it was the first of the year. We’ll have to do some editing to get the times down a bit, but the attendees were very engaged right through the end. There were a lot of good questions along the way, too. What did the attendees think of the class? Here’s a sampling of comments from the Course Evaluation forms: “The course was very informative, engaging, and educational.” “I was very impressed at how knowledgeable the presenters were. They were able to clearly answer some very esoteric questions.” On the constructive criticism side: even though we beefed up the security section this year a couple people asked for even more. And we had as many people say that the course was too short as too long; most said the length was just right. One comment deserves an answer: “The class is a good overview, but really to cover the information in enough depth to make it usable would take weeks.” I guess it could take weeks if you were implementing every facet of PROFINET. But that’s true of any comprehensive technology. The beauty of PROFINET is that you just need to learn and implement the facet you need. There is no need to learn all about motion control if all you need is IO. The important thing is that you can start with just IO and then when you need to add motion control you build on the knowledge you’ve already accumulated. You don’t have to start over learning a new technology, new tools, etc. We recognize that the best we can hope to provide in one day is an overview. Having an overview you can decide to adopt the technology. Then there are more in-depth classes available like our own PROFINET Certified Network Engineer class as well as vendor classes on their tools. I was glad to see one comment about the “nice touch of humor occasionally.” But was surprised they cited Karsten’s humor and not mine. <sigh> At the PROFINET Developer Workshop today I was surprised by the number of motion control folks we had. I know we helped a number of companies on their way to adding PROFINET to their products. We’re off to a roaring start with PROFINET; Process starts next week in Houston and PROFIBUS in Las Vegas. We take PROFINET to Montreal, Toronto, and Cleveland after that. [Posted Thursday since my flight home was delayed. Ah, the joys of business travel.] |
March 13, 2008