Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

In December, our Web Team here at the San Jose Public Library had the pleasure of being trained on administering Drupal by Greg Knaddison of Growing Venture Solutions.  We had considered several different companies and independent consultants, and decided on GVS because of their expertise and reasonable pricing (always a rare combination).  Greg also showed immense patience as we muddled through a complex, confusing, and brain-exploding contract process.  GVS is based in Colorado, but as you can tell by their trip out to (at that time) sunny California, they do travel to do outside training.

We had three days of completely hands-on training, going through Drupal basics and ending up creating our own complex pages, forms, drawing data from multiple sources.  Greg was an excellent trainer and the training was well-organized. Greg is extremely knowledgable about every aspect of Drupal. As one of the Drupal community's most active members, Greg (aka greggles) has an incredible range of information immediately at his disposal about the system's capabilities and processes. The training was extremely flexible – Greg let us stop and ask questions whenever we wanted, pause for hands-on work, and breeze through issues of less interest to us. Greg is a very friendly trainer, approachable, easy to work with, and amazingly knowledgable.

I would recommend him for any institution seeking training on any aspect of Drupal. Though we had three days of training, I wish we had five instead so that we could have gone more in depth into each topic and access Greg's wealth of knowledge!  We're looking for long-term support for Drupal now, and eyeing GVS seriously.  I find it so wonderful that there is a market to sustain companies that support open source applications.  It says a lot about how far the web has come so quickly, philosophically.  And thanks again Greg!