Interest about Unisys AB Suite programming environment among students in Latvia is increasing rapidly. There is a growing number of issued AB Suite Certificates for the students by Unisys.

Baltic Technology Group (BTG), a long-term partner of Unisys, is teaching AB Suite courses in University of Latvia and Daugavpils University. At both universities, students are learning AB Suite as part of their Computer Science curriculum. AB Suite training includes design, development and testing in AB Suite Runtime for Windows Operating System.

AB Suite is a Unisys Corporation’s fourth generation programming language, which was specially designed to enable rapid development of banking, insurance, accounting and other business systems. Users of systems developed in AB Suite & EAE (LINC) can easily customize these systems to meet their unique requirements since it is very easy to modify and add features to AB Suite & EAE (LINC) systems.

BTG’s AB Suite course is called “AB Suite Programming Environment”.  The course provides an initial overview of the Agile Business Suite programming environment.  This includes the software development environment and information systems that model actual business systems.  The AB Suite System Modeler and Runtime use Visual Studio .NET, SQL Server, and .NET Framework on Windows XP. 

The course provides training in the following topics: AB Suite Philosophy and Concepts, Introduction to System Modeler, Modes of Operation, Development Environment and Structure, System Data Items, Item Attributes’ Logic Commands and Tools. 

The primary elements of focus of the course are:

• System Modeler environment
• System Modeler language
• Debugger test facilities
• Runtime environment for deploying runtime systems

This course contains a total of 64 academic hours.  16 of the hours are lecture and 48 are lab and practical exercises.  So, the course could be considered 1/4 theoretical and 3/4 hands on. 

All training materials for the BTG course are based on the following Unisys AB Suite training materials:

1. Unisys Agile Business Suite: Getting Started with Developer System Modeler Student Workbook. Copyright 2007 Unisys Corporation.
2. Unisys Agile Business Suite 1.2 LDL+ Programming Reference Guide. Copyright 2006 Unisys Corporation.
3. Unisys Agile Business Suite 1.2 Developer User Guide. Copyright 2006 Unisys Corporation.

Starting with 2008, Unisys Education Services is issuing ‘Certificates of Attendance’ to students that pass the AB Suite course (either at the University of Latvia or Daugavpils University).  BTG notifies Unisys of the students who pass the University courses and Unisys issues certificates in the students’ names.