I need several of my team to gain more knowledge so that they can adequately support and maintain our Avaya PDS. We are struggling to find any appropriate courses - the only one we have found so far is on the Avaya learning site but is restricted to Avaya Associates and Avaya Business Partners only. Any pointers in the right direction would be appreciated.

Bryan,

Do you have a PDS v12 or Proactive Contact 3.0? Having been a dialler manager for a PDS v12, I have been through both online and residential Avaya PDS courses at the Avaya University at Uxbridge and I would recommend them however a good starting point to gauge your teams' abilities and needs are the online courses Avaya do.

On the learning site : http://learning2.avaya.com/

You'll want to look at :

BTC267W2 - Minimal Cost plus online exam at end

Description:
This course is designed for Avaya Associates, Business Partners, and Customers who administer, configure, install, or support the Avaya(TM) Predictive Dialing System (PDS).

and if this is not deemed enough, the residential course :

BTC268H2 - Around £1800 however does provide good practical experience - with online exam at end

Description:
This course is designed for Avaya Associates, Business Partners, and Customers who are responsible for system administration of the Avaya Predictive Dialing System (PDS) 12.0.

There is also now a free course which is a pre-requisite for many others :

AVA00551AEN
Description:
The purpose of this assessment is to validate that the learner has a proficient and knowledgeable understanding of Avaya™ Predictive Dialing System (PDS) Release 9 or PDS Release 11, to enroll in the PDS Release 12 course, AVA00479WEN, Using Avaya PDS 12.

This assessment is designed for Avaya Associates, Business Partners and Customers who are, or will be responsible for the administration of PDS 12.

The most expensive option will be to get Avaya or another training company onsite to teach your staff. I would suggest you start with the above courses and play around with your PDS in a test environment as this is the best way to learn. The online manuals or CD's you should have with your system will help as well for a good understanding of the system.

Let me know if you need any further info.

Regards,

Gary.

Hi, thanks for your reply...we support PDS v12.0

Apart from the free assessment course, we have had people attend the other courses you listed. What I am looking for is a course like BTC139H2 - configuring and supporting Avaya PDS 12.0 - unfortunately Avaya state that that the course is restricted to Avaya Associates and Avaya Business Partners. I am looking for a course that covers similer content whether that be through Avaya or another training company.

Thanks,
Bryan

Hi Brian

I can put in a call tomorrow and find out whether or not this course is available for you. I don't think you will have any luck with external companies offering this course as its so specific.

Regards
Jason

I'm not able to add any value here Gary is obviously very well clued up.

I have called Avaya University and they confirmed what you have already found, the course you want is not available to customers.

They recomended the same course Gary did, BTC267W2.

As I said earlier I dont think you will get anywhere looking for other companies offering PDS training courses.

Good luck anyway.
Jason

Hi Bryan,

Yes, as Jason has also discovered this course has typically been for the support companies that support the PDS, to ensure their engineers can competently deal with high level configuration changes, list creation, completion code amendments, list processing changes etc etc. I was offered a place on this course a while back after much pressuring of Avaya University as we were intending to fully support the back end configuration and setup of the PDS. I decided not to take this up as we agreed a support contract for these PDS tasks, which has sufficed to date.

It is a very involved 10 days course for persons with excellent telecoms and dialler / unix knowledge and for the cost of training (of perhaps sending multiple candidates), you may be better served having back-end work done by your support company or Avaya directly.

Hope this helps.

Gary.

Hi Both,

Thanks for your reponses and your efforts. Unfortunatley, we don't have a support company...our company wants us to support everything ourselves which as you can appreciate is quite hard when we can not find any appropriate training.

Is your company a member of any call centre trade associations eg call centre assoc. That might be an avenue?

An avenue for what? Technical support? Technical training?