Systura Where information becomes knowledge...

I have been dealing with Check Point Firewall-1 for many years and was one of the first instructors in Canada.  In the past few years, Check Point has been asking its instructors to come to their training centers to take part in the alpha and beta training sessions when they are developing new courses.  I have tried many times to go and take part in these sessions and I have always had a conflict which prevented me from going.

In November 2010, the moon and the stars must have aligned properly, and I was able to attend the alpha/beta training session for Check Point Security Expert R70 course(CCSE R70).  This is a brand new course from Check Point as they have rewritten the courses.  The current CCSA R65 and CCSE R65 have really been combined into a single CCSA R70 course, so the CCSE R70 course is a new week long course that is about 50% new stuff and 50% of topics that have been in and out of various CCSE courses over time.

The topics of the new CCSE R70 course are:

1. Management Portal
2. Smart Workflow
3. SmartProvisioning
4. SSL Portal-Based VPN
5. Acceleration
6. High Availability
7. Clustering
8. Advanced Networking - Routing
9. Advanced Networking - Load Balancing
10. Advanced Networking - QoS
11. Reporting
12. Event Analysis

The session I attended was very good.  As contributors, we got to see the early layout of the course and make suggestions about the content and test the labs for each section.  The main challenge with the labs is that Check Point has finally embraced virtualization, which means the entire layout for the labs has been recreated in VMWare.  I think we fought more with the VMWare configuration over the first two days versus the quality of the labs - I guess that is what happens when you are taking part of an alpha/beta session.  Overall, it was a great session and good to meet the people who write the course as well as some other engineers who actually teach the material.

For my efforts, I, along with my other students, are credited with being contributors to the course in the beginning of the course and lab books.  I am pretty excited about it.  This is the closest I have been to being published, so far.