Virtual Training

Eliminate classroom setup hassles with virtual training environments

Today's software buyers seek comprehensive hands-on training classes to get the most value out of their software investments and accelerate knowledge transfer. Training organizations are typically required to set up and maintain multiple training rooms with complex software, hardware, and network configurations or physically ship mobile labs to customer sites. This is an expensive and time consuming task that often gets minimal IT support. This endeavor also distracts trainers from their core mission: To create engaging training classes and educate customers.

The challenge of setting up classroom environments and delivering high quality training creates a dilemma for training managers: How do you deliver fast, easy, and secure training to your most valued customers, while lowering costs and IT resource needs?

Skytap Cloud for virtual training resolves this dilemma

Skytap Cloud empowers training managers to take their existing classroom environments to the cloud without requiring any application rewrites. As a training manager, you can create your trainer-student machine configurations in the cloud in seconds using an easy-to-use web UI. This provides a hands-on learning experience with “learn from anywhere” flexibility for your customers and trainers.

As a training manager you can centrally manage all the classroom virtual machine images, student and trainer access, usage, and security policies. Remotely connecting to any student virtual machine to have over the shoulder access is delivered in a single mouse click. These features provide the visibility and control you need to run high quality training classes and provide virtual training on par with physical classroom delivery models.

Skytap Cloud can be used for a broad range of virtual training scenarios, including:

• Virtual training labs (replace physical machines and rooms)
• Remote training classes for synchronous and asynchronous learning
• New hire skills assessment
• New application roll-out training
• Application/OS migration training
• Employee skills development
• Simulated enterprise application environments

Top 5 Features and Benefits at a Glance

Accelerate training delivery with templates

Using Skytap Cloud you can create a centralized repository of existing classroom images from the training machines you use today without any code changes. Training managers can use Skytap Cloud’s easy-to-use, self-service web UI to provision new classrooms and run multiple classes instantly and in parallel. You can easily deploy classes and scale the number of virtual classrooms to match your training needs. Once a class is completed, student environments can be removed, or copied and saved as a template for re-use.

Launch a hands-on distance learning program with flexible schedules

Using Skytap Cloud you can schedule virtual training classes and provide secure web-based access to each student with specific access rights. Each student can access the classroom image for which he/she is authorized from anywhere in the world securely with any modern web browser. Classes can be scheduled to run at specific times enabling you to manage your capacity efficiently and to provide flexibility to your students and trainers.

Collaborate more effectively with your students

You can provide each student with his or her own custom learning environment in a physical classroom setup without having to go through a time consuming set up process. Students can access their virtual classroom with SmartClient, a web-based console accessible through any modern web browser. The best part is they can access that same experience from any location with Internet connectivity. This enables training typically delivered in a physical environment to be transformed into a distance learning program. SmartClient provides trainers with an "over the shoulder" view of the entire virtual classroom allowing them to start, stop, view, and suspend training to collaborate with their students and maximize learning. You can even provide shared access to a group of students to enable team collaboration and learning.

Create virtual learning labs with fewer IT resources

The projects, groups, and roles features in Skytap Cloud enable training managers to create different groups of users and share cloud resources via projects. Project teams with multiple members can collaborate to create, review, and approve classroom content. Team members can be assigned specific roles and permissions in the system to create and publish classrooms for students.

Training managers can scale capacity on-demand and scale down when there is limited usage for virtual lab environments—a superior alternative to incurring capital costs for software and hardware that will cycle between periods of under-utilization and less than adequate capacity. Training managers can manage Skytap Cloud usage with trainer-specific quota and usage limits. Training environments can also be configured to suspend automatically when not in use, so that usage perfectly matches virtual classroom demand.

Enable student collaboration

Training managers can create different groups of users, and share cloud resources via projects in Skytap Cloud. Project teams with multiple members can easily collaborate, create, review, and approve training content. Each team member can be provided a role in the system with specific permissions to create and publish classroom environments to students. Creating and sharing standardized student and classroom builds across your global training organization can be achieved with the click of a button.

For an in-depth overview of Skytap's training solution, download the white paper on 'Reinventing the Virtual Classroom: Delivering Hands-On Training using Cloud Computing'.