Entrinsik has launched a traveling road show to provide Informer training. The idea for the Informer Power Users Road Show grew out of the success of the ICON Informer user conference and the feedback Entrinsik was receiving about the Informer customer service team’s on-site work with individual clients, Sharon Shelton, vice president of marketing at Entrinsik, tells DBTA. “The road shows are really an answer to the question: How do we provide this service for more of our client base – especially those who can’t make it to ICON, or don’t have the resources to afford implementation and training services on-site. We are trying to get the best information out to customers in a way that is cost-efficient for them and for us,” Shelton says.
Informer is an agile operational business intelligence solution that gives users the ability to link disparate sources of data on one report or dashboard quickly and easily. With an intuitive web-based interface and ad hoc data analysis capabilities, business users can now uncover critical insights in the information they work with every day without relying on IT. Informer is used by over 1,000 organizations around the world.
According to Tim Nicholson, director of Informer Customer Services, the three-day road show events are broken into two classes. Each hands-on event is designed for Informer administrators, power users and IT staff who want to expand their technical knowledge of Informer in order to best leverage their organizational investment. The one-and-a-half day script class covers how customers can create their own Informer calculated columns using JavaScript.
“We have a feature within the product that allows customers to develop their own calculated columns using JavaScript and customers have a lot of questions about how they can write that code. Since there was a big need for training there, we decided to develop a very focused course on JavaScript that deals specifically with Informer because those columns are very useful in allowing users to do things with the reports and extending their data capabilities,” explains Nicholson. The one-and-a-half day plug-in class allows users to learn about developing plug-ins for row-level security, single sign on, look-and-feel, and dashboard functionality. “The plug-ins provide extensibility to the product,” Nicholson notes.
The road shows are being held in cooperation with Entrinsik’s educational customers. The partnership provides complementary training for their staffs, while Entrinsik gains regional venues for its road show. While the sites are that of customers, the training is based on generic Informer with generic data so it is applicable to a broad range of users, Nicholson emphasizes. Attendance at each class is being capped at about 20 attendees to maintain quality one-on-one time with clients. “We developed the courses just out of a need for helping customers to use our product even further,” Nicholson says, adding, “We have had an extreme amount of interest from companies that want to know where and when the next one will be.”
Following on from the first workshop in early December 2012 at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, NC, which provided training for the Southeast region, the road show will travel in 2013 to the Northeast with a workshop at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, PA on March 4, 5, and 6; and then on to the upper Midwest with training at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana, on May 21, 22, and 23.
From there, the Informer Road Show will continue to the lower Midwest in early summer, the West Coast in the third quarter, and then back to the Southeast again in the fourth quarter.
For more information, send an email to Tim Nicholson here.
For a demonstration of Informer or a free trial, visit www.entrinsik.com/informer-free-trial.