As mentioned in an earlier post, I enrolled on the SA210 Business Objects Enterprise XIR2 Administering Users & Content e-learning course. This, together with experience and the various PDF guides available from the BOBJ Support site, should give me enough material to pass the SABE210 exam. Although I can’t confirm this, I have read in the BOBJ forum that the e-learning material is based on the same material as that used for the classroom based course.
The course itself is delivered via the web. It is broken down into a number of easy to manage lessons. Most lessons have practical exercises with worked examples. These are quite simple and reiterate material presented in the lesson. At the end of each lesson, you are given a short test ranging between two and eight multiple choice questions. If you have gone through and understood the material in the lesson, these tests shouldn’t pose much of a problem. You can go through the lessons and tests as many times as you like. Note: the test scores do not count towards the final exam!
The material is quite thorough and plenty of examples are provided throughout. To further expand your knowledge, I would suggest reading the XIR2 Admin and Installation PDF guides. These can be downloaded from the BOBJ support website.
To be honest, all of the material presented in the course is available in these guides. However, the course material manages to extract the key elements and present it in easy to manage lessons. You also don’t have the benefit of the practical exercises or tests.
On the positive side, the course is comprehensive, offers plenty of detail, has practical exercises and contains handy tests.
Two downsides in my opinion. Firstly, cost. In the UK, the course will set you back £580. This is not a trivial sum of money, particularly for a web based course. While it is half the price of the equivalent classroom based course, I do feel it is expensive, particularly if you compare this to a similar IT course of the same duration. Secondly, you don’t get any printed materials. While you do have access to the web course material for one year, it would be incredibly useful to have the printed materials. Considering the cost of the course, surely BOBJ could have stretched themselves to providing the same printed material as handed out in the classroom course?
I do wonder whether it is possible to pass the SABE210 exam solely based on experience and the Installation and Admin guides alone. I should be able to answer that in the next few days. I’m going to be taking the SABE210 exam shortly. While I won’t be able to post any details about the exam, I should be able to give an indication as to whether it is worth taking the course.
