Business Rules, Inc.

Business Rules, Inc. (BRI) was born in 1999 when we set up shop as business analysts for software development. Along the way we heard many strange reasons to keep archaic business processes in place, even when they made no practical or financial sense. "Those are our business rules," said our customers. Hence, the name of our company.

Since then, we assisted in the creation of a title management system at HarperCollins, untangled corporate help-desk procedures for Barnes & Noble, and managed the development of an online teachers tool for Scholastic.

We confess, however, that BRI was PC-based until 2000. As we discovered the efficiencies of Apple products and software, we transitioned exclusively to the Mac OS in 2002.

Since 2003, when BRI became certified to teach Apple classes, we have taught Apple classes to hundreds of students in thousands of classrooms internationally and throughout the United States.

We opened our spacious Apple Authorized Training Center (AATC) in 2006 in the glorious Hudson River hamlet of Rhinecliff, NY. There we provide IT, video and hardware technicians with personal attention in a quiet, intimate classroom. We also bring our training to schools and companies all over the country.

We earned Apple's prestigious AATC Gold Level status in 2009, thanks to our loyal customers, and have maintained this status every year since. We're hugely proud of this industry mark of achievement for our lil' ol' AATC located in a tiny river town.

You may not know where Rhinecliff is as you read this, but we can almost guarantee you'll want to come back again and again to train with BRI.

To learn more about who we are and what we do, download our brochure (PDF).

Shelley Weiner, President, was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and graduated from Colby College (B.A., English) and Columbia University (Certificate, Database Application Design and Development). Shelley started her career as a graphic arts production manager and spent eight years in commercial printing sales before turning her hand to technology. Reluctantly leaving behind the snappy pulse of her beloved New York City, she moved in 2002 to rural Columbia County, NY, where she revels in the creative spirit, superb local cuisine and sheer beauty of the mid-Hudson Valley. Jazzing jaded technicians and opening minds to the joys of Apple hardware and software are two of her biggest highs, along with cooking with, and for, friends, listening to everything from fado to opera to samba, and reading non-fiction of all types.

Barbra Vogel, BRI's Vice President and a Wisconsin native (she wears her cheesehead hat when the Badgers or Packers are playing), spent most of her career in reference and educational publishing, including management stints at Encyclopedia Britannica and Scholastic as Vice President of its Internet Group. She holds advanced degrees in cartography, geographic information systems and digital image processing, and business administration. Even though Barbra is no longer working in the mapping field, she still has an unnatural interest in all things map- and geography-related.

Our training team also includes:

Jeffery Battersby, a native of the San Francisco Bay area and now a Hudson Valley resident, is an 18-year tech veteran and corporate IT manager. He has introduced and integrated Macs into diverse IT infrastructures, including IBM iSeries servers, Windows, Citrix, and VMWare XenApp environments. Jeff developed and deployed the Mac-based help desk service for New York's largest personal injury law firm, and is a regular contributor to Macworld and Macworld.com. He is a former newspaper publisher, sometime-actor, fulltime husband and father of three.

Valerie Bishop, Business Rule's creative director, webmaster and general project manager, is a creative professional with over three decades of experience. A native New Yorker and proud Rhode Island School of Design graduate, Valerie has worked for the biggest brands in the world on a wide variety of creative projects large and small, and for both print and web platforms. She created her first graphics project on a Mac Plus, circa-1987, and she's been a Apple devotee ever since. Along with her love of graphic design, Apple products and anything visual, Valerie is a shameless collector of all things paper. She loves to cook, bake, and can be found walking her pug, Yogi, close to her home deep in the heart of Brooklyn (yo!).

Rob Daniels, a Kansas City (KS) native and owner of a Macintosh-focused consulting and training company based in Shawnee, Kansas, brings a unique blend of training to his consulting and hands-on experience to his training. Rob has supported the Mac and Adobe communities since the early 1990's, and his clients include a mix of enterprise, medium, small and home-based businesses. Rob, an Apple Certified Trainer since 2005, has trained well over 16,000 people in seminars, conferences and classrooms across all 50 states since the mid-90's. One of his signature achievements was writing, and delivering, a training class to Hallmark Cards' entire staff of 1600+ Mac users during the company's transition to Mac OS X.

Julie Flowers, our office administrator, is a Hudson Valley native with 14 years experience in the semiconductor and IT industry. She supported computer chip manufacturing, research and development and human resources at IBM's corporate headquarters, and loves all things technology. Julie enjoys photography and 2D design. and can be found throughout the Valley, camera in hand and a smile on her face. Her passion for photography and history motivated her to start a photo restoration business, and she also moonlights as a freelance photographer for many local musicians/bands in our local area.

Todd Jarrard was born and raised in Michigan, and has never owned anything he hasn’t disassembled. He attended Florida State University before plunging into a career as a graphic designer. After years of handling every issue one could come across using Macs for graphic production, he became an Apple Certified Macintosh Technician, working in Chicago, New York CIty and Detroit. He now has over 10 years of bench experience, and has worked with clients as diverse as the Museum of Natural History and the NHL. When he is not training technicians, he spends his time sailing small boats with his girlfriend, leading his dogs through the parks of metro Detroit, and experimenting with cheese-based cuisine.

Davis H. Jefferson was an IT sales executive and branch manager for an Apple Specialist dealership. He holds several Apple technical certifications and now uses his many years of business and technical experience in his work as an Apple Certified Trainer. He is a member of the Apple Consultants Network, Macintosh Users of Delaware, and the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce. Davis earned his undergraduate degree from Washington College. He resides in Newark, DE, with his wife, daughter, and a feisty little Cairn terrier.