You probably have noticed our scrolling banner on the home page along with a tab marked Training Spotlight. I hope you've all had the opportunity to explore this but if you haven't, I wanted to give you a quick rundown of this campaign.

Training Spotlight highlights one course each month which we will feature on the Training Spotlight page. We've then gone to our Partners and asked them if they would be willing to provide discounts or other benefits to you the customer for this course this month. We also have various courseware authors and partners blog about the featured course to give you a better idea of the course. You can see those posts on the Training Spotlight page as well. For this month, we had Eamonn Kelly, Product Planner for Microsoft Learning, give a better view of what the course covers. Here's an excerpt of his blog post:

"At a high level it covers Hyper-V, SCVMM 2008 R2, Integration with SCOM 2008 R2, DPM 2007 Sp1 as well as RDS. So it’s a broad set of technologies and students should come away from it with a good understanding of what the options and pitfalls are when considering virtualizing a server infrastructure."
"The lab experience for students was one of the key drivers when designing the course and as such the requirements for the labs are above the standard spec, namely a single host running Windows server 2008 RTM. In this course the Instructor and each student require two host machines running Windows Server 2008 R2. Labs covering High Availability, in Module 9 for example, will not be able to be completed unless this is available, but this "above standard" spec does provide an excellent and real world lab experience. Definitely to be recommended to students!"

We're now in our second month (the first we covered a Windows Server course), and the reception has been terrific. For this month's offer (course 10215), we have 67 partners offering 20-30% discounts off the tuition fees for the course to others offering free products (one is even offering free Bose headphones!). You can check for partners who are offering this promotion on the right hand side of the Training Spotlight page.

This campaign runs until July and we'll feature courses on SharePoint, Windows 7, SQL Server, and Virtual Studio 2010 in the coming months.

This is a very exciting pilot that we're doing this year and based on your reception, we may continue to provide these offers on a regular basis. If you've signed up for a course through Training Spotlight, let us know in the comments!