Welcome!

Formerly known as ExecuTrain of Utah, Expand Learning Solutions is the leading corporate computer and skills Training provider in the Intermountain region.  Whether it is Desktop applications, IT Training, Certifications testing, Project Management or Business and Interpersonal Skills training, we deliver your training solution.

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Expand Learning Solutions is a locally-owned and operated computer software and business skills training center providing training and learning solutions to companies, non-profits and governments across the Intermountain region.  

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Expand Learning Solutions is Utah's leader in developing and delivering business technology training. Our comprehensive, customer-focused solutions include instructor-led and technology-based training for popular desktop applications plus course development and training on client-specific software applications. Technical training and business skills training keep professionals current on the latest technologies and techniques. Custom course development and administrative support services are also available to complete a well-rounded, professional program.

Unified Communications delivering on ROI expectations

CDW's second annual Unified Communications Tracking Poll had positive news about the implementation of the technology, most notably that 71 percent of organizations that have fully implemented Unified Communications (UC) say that return on investment (ROI) has met or exceeded their expectations. Read More >>>

Technology budgets 2010: Maintenance gobbles up software spending

Software represents 34 percent of enterprise technology spending, but nearly 55 percent of the applications budget is consumed by maintenance and supporting ongoing operations, according to Forrester Research. Read More >>>

10 things you should know about DirectAccess

DirectAccess is a new remote access technology that's available with the combination of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate editions. DirectAccess promises to revolutionize the entire remote access experience so that employees can be productive from anywhere at any time, without the constraints of traditional remote access technologies, such as network-level VPNs, SSL VPN gateways, and reverse proxies. It provides a seamless experience for users and advanced management capabilities for IT. DirectAccess enables access from anywhere, even when the DirectAccess client system is behind a restrictive firewall. Read More >>>

Certifications Are No Longer Optional

By Bart Perkins
For many years, IT management has preached standardization -- within IT and across the corporation. Yet at the same time, we have largely failed to standardize IT skills within our own organizations or across the industry. Certifications can help there, but for much of IT's history, such credentials have often been overlooked or undervalued in the hiring process.
That's changing.

Some employers are beginning to require certs for a wide range of jobs, and they often adjust salaries accordingly. With so many job seekers to choose from, employers need to quickly identify those who have the skills they seek. Granted, technical certifications do not guarantee that applicants will have the people and political skills that it takes to succeed in a corporate environment, but they can help employers triage rsums. And they're helpful in avoiding the costs and productivity losses associated with training new hires. For new college graduates, a certification in programming says, "I know about more than the theories and models we learned about in school." Read More >>>.

Citrix and Microsoft Team up for "Hands On Lab"!

posted by Tedd Fox

Want to test XenDesktop 4 on Hyper-V, but you cannot find the time to build a test environment? Well look no further, Citrix and Microsoft have teamed up to bring you the Hands on Lab. What is Hands on Lab, you ask? The Hands on Lab is a pre-built environment / training session that is interactive and totally usable for testing and seeing the combined power of XenDesktop 4 and Microsoft Hyper-V.Read More >>>.

Announcing the Outlook Social Connector

We are excited to announce the Outlook Social Connector!

The Outlook Social Connector is a set of new features to help keep track of your friends and colleagues while enabling you to grow your professional network. The Outlook Social Connector is available now as part of the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta.

The Outlook Social Connector (OSC) brings social views of your colleagues and friends right to your Inbox. As you read your e-mail messages, glance down at the new People Pane to see the picture, name, and title of the sender. A rich, aggregated collection of information about the sender is included.

The OSC presents useful information including:

• Communication history Your mailbox is searched and the recent messages you’ve exchanged with that person appear. Can’t remember the last time you e-mailed this person? A quick look at the OSC reveals the last time you received an email from them, and one click opens up the message.
• Meetings When is the next scheduled meeting with this person? The OSC shows upcoming appointments that include you and the message sender.
• Attachments Can’t find the attachment that the person is referring to in a message? With the OSC you can quickly review attachments that you and the sender have exchanged. One-click access quickly opens the attachment or you can see the message that it is attached to.
• Activity feeds Stay on top of activities involving your colleagues and friends in real time. The OSC connects to business and consumer social networks.
• Did you say activity feeds? Yes we did! The OSC makes Outlook 2010 a social networking tool by connecting to the new social experiences in SharePoint 2010. That connection allows the OSC to download activity feeds for colleagues and display them inside the new People Pane.

You’ll see rich information about your colleagues’ activity such as profile updates to their MySite, documents and websites they tag, and changes to their personal status message.
Know who you’re meeting with. Use the OSC’s Gallery View to see all of the people you’ll be interacting with in an upcoming meeting.

One click on any of those pictures puts you into the single-person view, providing easy access to their activities and communication history. You can easily switch in and out of Gallery View by clicking on the little double-arrow icon in the upper-right corner of the People Pane.
Build your network. The OSC makes it easy to grow your network; by clicking the ‘+’ symbol underneath a person’s picture, you can send a request to be their colleague on any of the networks you are connected to. The OSC also automatically synchronizes your colleagues from each of your connected networks and saves them as contacts in Outlook. This allows you to easily send messages, call, or synchronize contacts just as you would any other Outlook contact.
Open Connectivity. The OSC in Outlook 2010 will connect by default to the new social networking experiences in SharePoint 2010. We are happy to announce that connectivity to any network, including SharePoint, is built using our public ‘provider’ extensibility platform.

This means that anyone can build a provider to connect the OSC to a social network, their company’s line-of-business applications, or literally any system that can produce streams of activity about its users. The SDK will be publically available tomorrow on MSDN, and my colleague Randy Byrne will be making a more detailed post on provider development with links to the SDK at that time. We are excited to make this platform public and are looking forward to feedback as our customers begin developing providers for their networks and business solutions.
Go Live! Next year we will be releasing a provider for Windows Live, enabling you to connect to your friends and colleagues on Windows Live right inside of Outlook.

You see pictures, profile updates, and personal status messages of your friends from Windows Live Messenger. See their Office application and document activity through SkyDrive integration, and the aggregation of dozens of other third-party sites from around the world.
Are you working with other social networks? You bet! Outlook has partnered with LinkedIn, the online professional networking site, to provide an amazing connected experience for our shared customers. The LinkedIn team has built a provider for the OSC using our public SDK, providing you with pictures and activity information for your colleagues directly from their network. Simply click on a message from a co-worker to discover what new connections they’ve made on LinkedIn, or click the LinkedIn badge underneath a photo to jump right to a person’s profile page on the Web.

Keep watching the Outlook Team Blog for an announcement about when the LinkedIn provider is available to Outlook 2010 users. You can learn more about the LinkedIn provider here on their website.

Customize it! Does your company use a large system for managing information about its users or customers? By building an OSC provider to connect to your ERP or CRM solution, you can easily sync down people-related information into Outlook and see it in the People Pane when you’re reading your mail. Randy will have more information in his post about how to build a custom provider.

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2009/11/18/announcing-the-outlook-social-connector.aspx

How Does Cisco's Overhaul of the CCNP Certification Affect CCNP Candidates? An Interview with Wendell Odom

Linda Leung talks with Wendell Odom about the major changes in the new Cisco CCNP exams, what new knowledge is required of candidates, and how the changes benefit network professionals in their careers.

Cisco last month introduced a complete overhaul of its CCNP certification track to better reflect the evolving job tasks of global network professionals. Greater emphasis has been placed on maintaining a highly secure, complex routing and switching network that supports branch offices and mobile workers, as well as deliver voice and video services. Cisco has reduced the number of exams for the certification from four to three: ROUTE #642-902, SWITCH #642-813, and TSHOOT #642-832. The changes ensure that networking professionals have a deeper knowledge of the tasks they need to perform in the real world, with more emphasis on troubleshooting and planning.

The exams are scheduled to be available in March/April 2010, and the last day to take the old exams is July 31, 2010. To help you prepare for the new exams, Cisco Press has published (or will soon publish, in some cases) a comprehensive portfolio of CCNP self-study resources. One key title is CCNP Routing and Switching Official Certification Library (Exams 642-902, 642-813, 642-832), by Wendell Odom, David Hucaby, and Kevin Wallace.

I caught up with Wendell and asked him what are the major changes in the new CCNP exams, what new knowledge is required of candidates, and how the changes benefit network professionals in their careers.

Linda Leung: What are the overarching differences between the new CCNP vs. the old?

Wendell Odom: The biggest difference is that the old had much broader topic coverage, while the new CCNP gives much more focus on skills, and probably more depth for each topic. Gone are the ISCW and ONT exams, which together included QoS, multicast, wireless, MPLS, and security. The ROUTE exam removes IS-IS and multicast as well. But the addition of the TSHOOT exam is huge: a skills-based exam with a large degree of coverage from the ROUTE and SWITCH topics. There's also more emphasis on implementation and verification planning. So, think deeper mastery, more focused topic breadth, with the emphasis on routing and switching. Read More >>>

The Importance of Microsoft Certification Training to Your Career

By Johnie Fulton

February 15, 2010 02:07 PM EST

If you need to constantly grow and do well in your profession, you will need to discover different abilities. You need to become updated with all the most recent systems being launched available in the market. How can you do this? The solution is fairly simple and that is by "education".

Features about Certification Courses

Today, there are a of number of education programs which aim to provide corporate employees and others with every bit of info expected for their job. However, before you decide to take the first step, you will need to do some research work on the various available accreditation curriculums. You will have to define your skills and choose where you need to take your career. Look for certification courses applicable to your objectives. Read More >>>