We are considering holding a webinar to allow members of our community to come together to prioritise and plan Essential upgrades and extensions and to discuss various Essential training options, and would appreciate your input.

We have published a roadmap which shows the key areas of development for Essential and the requirements that we have within each.  We do not, however, intend to use this as a detailed plan but rather as an area where requirements are logged, and the community are able to set the priorities for completion.  We have already completed a number of items, but we would like to get your feedback and input both in confirming that all the current requirements are on the plan, or adding additional items, and also in identifying the priorities to allow us to focus our attention correctly.

We are in the process of defining an accreditation process, the intention being to make it easier for users who want some external support to ensure that they are getting it from a source that has Essential expertise.  However, it was always in our plans to offer some form of training on Essential and we would appreciate your feedback in the kind of training you would find useful.  For example, should the training address a specific architecture capability, such as ‘how to use Essential to manage the complexity and cost efficiency of my application portfolio’ or ‘How to use Essential to define my strategic IT architecture and create a transition plan’?  Or would concentrating on a particular layer of the architecture, for example, giving a detailed understanding of the application architecture layer, be more useful?   There are also various options for delivering the training, for example, onsite or offsite training courses, downloadable training packs, webinar courses etc.  There are numerous options and we want to ensure that we spend our time developing training in a form that the Community will find most useful.

Additionally, an Essential Project webinar would be a great opportunity to engage with our community members and discuss the successes and issues encountered when using Essential over the last year.   We’re not looking for specific installation or technical issues, but a view of where Essential is providing value to their teams and any areas that the Essential Project Team should concentrate on to ensure that it continues to add value in the coming years.  To that end, in addition to us presenting our roadmap and training thoughts, it would be great if a number of community members would be willing to speak about how they are using Essential, successes they have had and issues they have encountered, as well as any updates/extensions that they would like to see to make their lives easier.

For now, what we would really like to know is whether an Essential webinar would be of interest to you, whether you would like to attend such an event and whether you would be prepared to share your experiences with us and the community.  If you could spend a few seconds completing the poll on the left of the homepage it would be much appreciated.