Another Successful Year with AB Suite in Universities Across Latvia

Since 2006, Baltic Technology Group (BTG) has partnered with universities across Latvia to introduce students to the Agile Business Suite (AB Suite™) development environment and give the newest generation of programmers the skills they need to become attractive candidates to today’s businesses.

At the beginning of this academic year, however, this partnership faced a serious challenge. It had become quite hard to retain the same number of students in the AB Suite development courses we offer at the University of Latvia, Daugavpils University, and Ventspils University College, because a number of interesting study courses were recently added to the curriculum by Microsoft® and other large IT vendors.

In light of this challenge, we were very pleased this summer to learn about the release of AB Suite Express – a free download of the
AB Suite package that includes AB Suite Developer, the AB Suite Runtime for Windows, the Sample system, and Builder.

Giving students an opportunity to “test drive” the software before signing up for the course helped to increase interest, as well as enrollment. Also, the new Agile Business Suite Client Framework, which simplifies the process of building state-of-art user interfaces, is another factor that convinced students to join the AB Suite development course.

Based on student feedback, we determined that giving participants several methods to access the AB Suite development environment was another way to increase enrollment. So in addition to a remote connection to the BTG AB Suite study server, we also made virtual machines (VMs) available to students.

When coupled with this simplified approach to accessing the training environment, the enhancements built into AB Suite 5.0 have created a renewed interest in the AB Suite development course at the University of Latvia and Daugavpils University. Ventspils University College plans to offer the course during the upcoming spring semester, and we are quite confident that it will be a success there, as well.

To keep this momentum going, the BTG development and training teams look forward to joining the AB Suite 6.1 field test next year and introducing the newest AB Suite innovations to students across Latvia.

To learn more about BTG, please visit their web site.