Last week I attended the Blackberry training course for the recently released Blackberry Enterprise Server 5.0 in London.

It consisted of two courses, BlackBerry Enterprise Server Software version 5.0 - Essential and BlackBerry Enterprise Server Software version 5.0 - Comprehensive, which were both two days in length.

PDF's of the full syllabus are here: http://uk.blackberry.com/support/programs/bas_5%200_essential_syllabus.pdf & http://uk.blackberry.com/support/programs/bas_5%200_comprehensive_syllabus.pdf

The training location was at Stayahead Training’s site, near the Barbican, in London. No other training sites, in the UK, were available.

The courses mainly covered installing version 5 from scratch, upgrading from a version 4.1.6 BES, using the Blackberry Administration Service, setting up High Availability and the Blackberry Monitoring server.

One of the few unfortunate things about this training course is that there is only an Exchange version currently available, of the course, unlike the BES 4.1.6 version which has a Domino specific course.

Another problem was that some of the labs did not seem to work but I am sure this was more down to the fact that the facilities were not owned by RIM and could not be configured to allow the VM images direct access to the SRP servers.

Overall I thought the training was very useful and I would recommend it if you intend to upgrade your BES, to version 5, or install a BES for the first time.