Help Desk
Technical support at New Mind has been under a continued programme of improvement and expansion over the past two years.
The team is currently made up of seven dedicated staff comprising of:
- Support Manager
- Service Desk Analysts
- 1 Support Developer
- 2 Network Administrators (One Senior)
The New Mind Service Desk manages the support relationships for both the DMS and eCMS. The range of skills required to support customers in a first and second line capacity is offered through the Service Desk Analysts and Support Developer, with the Network Administrators maintaining and improving the external hosting solution. Incidents of a complex technical nature are passed to third line developer teams for resolution.
The Service Desk currently has, and aims to maintain the following technical skill sets:
- SQL Scripting.
- HTML, CSS and other web technologies such as Java and Ajax.
- Classic ASP.
- CISCO Networking and network security.
- MS Server Admin.
- ITIL Service Management.
All members of the team are experts in the New Mind suite of applications.
Service Desk Availability
The New Mind Service Desk is located at our Head Office in Liverpool, UK.
Hours of Helpdesk availability
The support desk is staffed Monday to Friday 8.00am to 6.00pm GMT.
Business critical out of hours support is provided via a dedicated telephone number.
Service Desk Tools
The main Service Desk tool used is the call logging system. The application is called Oxygen and is provided by E-Warehouse (www.e-warehouse.com). Examples of Oxygen’s functionality are given below.
Remote control software is also employed to connect to customers PC’s to view incidents that cannot be reproduced in house. ISL Light (www.isllight.com) is the current package we use, and although primarily a platform to view and resolve incidents remotely, this can also be used to give simple and effective training sessions to customers.
Service Desk Analysts and Network Administrators also respond to the events triggered by server and web monitoring software, detailed in the hosting section of this document
Service Desk procedure
The Service Desk is managed along ITIL Service Management guidelines and the majority of the processes within the Service Desk are referenced in part, from this best practice ethos. For more information on ITIL, please visit http://www.itil-officialsite.com/home/home.asp As a first and single point of contact for all users of New Mind technologies, the Service Desk acts as a funnel through which incidents (perceived or actual issues with the software), Service Requests and if necessary, Change Requests are channelled. Calls can be logged in using three different methods, telephone, email or web portal. We encourage all customers to use email or the web portal for low and medium priority incidents and telephone for high priorityAs well as performing fixes, the Service Desk also manages the incidents raised, keeping customers informed of progress on calls logged and liaising with Developer Teams over resolution times. The basic functions of the Service Desk are detailed in the right column.
