Last week, UALR’s College of Business partnered with Microsoft to host the first Arkansas Technical Education Symposium, offering business and technology professionals, students, and faculty hands-on workshops and informational sessions on topics that included Windows Phone 7, Microsoft Azure, data mining, search engine optimization, geographic information systems, and security.

Snow cut the Friday and Saturday, Feb. 4 and 5, symposium short at the university’s Donald W. Reynolds Center for Business and Economic Development. But the free event managed to get in a few sessions before the flakes accumulated.

College of Business faculty and students, representatives from the Institute for Economic Advancement and the Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center, and Microsoft IT professionals facilitated the sessions.

“It was truly a one-of-a-kind opportunity to increase IT and IT management skills,” said Dr. James Parrish, assistant professor of management.

Dr. Bradley K. Jensen, principal academic relationship manager at Microsoft Corp., was to deliver the keynote.

Three members of a team of management information systems (MIS) students working on an independent study for Walmart were scheduled to demonstrate an application they created to run on Microsoft Azure – Microsoft’s cloud platform – and discussed Azure’s business value and technical components.