The Orchard Hungary Team completed its first training-related assignment at the end of January. We were contacted by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, which is a governmental organisation in the United Kingdom, that they would like to migrate both their intranet and internet applications to Orchard - a process they already started to execute. They have an experienced team of software developers at the Manchester HQ for whom they sought training solutions in Orchard: that's where we came into picture.

Since we already had a set of training methods outlined (and some experience gained at our university) besides our Training Demo module we happily accepted their request and started working on the refinement and customization of the training materials.

To put it in a nutshell, it was a great experience. Not to mention that we discovered some new things about Orchard (and a few bugs) while we worked with great people who also experienced the great things about Orchard development (and its heavier sides :-)). The five days of training was divided into four sections:

• 1.5 days of user training to discover the Admin UI of a fresh Orchard instance
• 2 days of developer training covering the basics of Orchard module and theme development
• 0.5 day hackathon: divided into two groups we worked on actual problems that need to be solved for NICE
• 1 day pair programming: while working on their current tasks, we worked together with each of the participants for a while to help them advancing in their work

I think we could conclude that last two sections were the most exciting and profitable (we had to build up the basic knowledge before those, of course), since "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" (this proverb may only exist in Hungarian, if indeed it is, let's start a new trend, shall we?). We will implement these experiences in our training methods to make the upcoming ones better and more efficient.

We also had the chance to do some tourism in the weekend: we visited Liverpool's docks and wandered a bit in Manchester while visiting two of the city's awesome museums.

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