How do you make a great Product Even better?

 

Lets see….

 

 

In an effort to improve what is already a great Service Program, we have made the following additions/changes to RAMP.

 

New Personnel:

 

In an effort to stay ahead of the curve, we are hiring two new service people. We will be bringing on a full time Technical Service Specialist that will be able to work with you immediately and a  full time entry level support person to take care of a lot of the small day to day things that take the current staff away from concentrating on more complicated technical support issues. We hope to have both of these positions filled by the middle of September. We will send out a notice once these positions have been filled.

 

Hands Free Software:

 

JMK has spent a great deal of time over the past twelve months, testing products that will help us be more proactive in supporting your networks. We have chosen a product called Hands Free. While many of you may already have this product installed on your Servers, you will soon have it on your workstations as well. This product is non-intrusive and it will greatly improve the Services that we currently provide. Hands Free will…

  1. Alarm us of any Server or workstation issues such as low memory or disk space.
  2. Allow us to automate the rollout of Patches during scheduled evening hours to workstations.
  3. Prevent unauthorized systems changes that could be targets of Intruders.
  4. Help us Clean up Spyware, Adware and Viruses
  5. Provide Asset ManagementReports: The software will provide us with asset management Reports to give us a better handle on what we are supporting and what you need to be looking at replacing.

 

Although this software comes with a fairly large annual cost, no additional charges will be assumed by our RAMP Clients.

 

After Hour Support:

 

A year ago we announced a new product called RAMP Plus. With RAMP Plus you were able to extend the hours of RAMP Support until 8:00 PM on Monday thru Friday and Receive support on Saturdays from 8:30 AM to 1:00 PM.

 

We are dropping RAMP Plus and the requirement to pay an additional monthly fee of $50.00 to be eligible for this support. As of October 1 2004 all RAMP clients will receive after hour support when requested. However, after hour support will still be considered billable at a Time and material Rate of $185.00 per hour with a one hour minimum. The after hour support hours will remain the same as listed above.

 

We believe that it is important to be available for our clients if they need us outside of the normal business hours. However, we also need to pay additional staff to be available for this support. So, if you need emergency help after normal business hours, please feel free to call us at 978-356-8885. We will have a Service person ready for your call.

 

SPAM:

 

We have decided to add SPAM filtering to RAMP. What does this mean to you?

 

  1. If you have Exchange Server version 2000 or later and
  2. If you have fewer than 25 employees and
  3. If you are a RAMP customer

 

Then, we will filter your email at JMK before it arrives to your mail server. All SPAM will be forwarded to each users folder list which will be marked as a SPAM folder. It will be the responsibility of each user to clean out this folder on a daily basis. If JMK needs to get involved in cleaning up any issues, due to the enduser’s failure to clean up their SPAM folders, then the time to do so will be billable.

 

There will be a flat setup fee of $300.0 to setup this feature of RAMP. However, there will be no additional monthly charges.

 

Disaster Recovery:

 

As you know we introduced a new program Last year called ODS. ODS allowed us to retrieve your backup information over the web and make it available on line in the event of a disaster. Unfortunately, the software program, that we had chosen to perform the retrieval piece, has not worked as advertised. Therefore, we are withdrawing ODS from our list of Services.

 

However, we are still offering to RAMP Clients only, the ability to send a weekly copy of your data backup to JMK’s data center via UPS. We will then make this data available each month so that up to 5 employees can access your data remotely in the case of an emergency or disaster. We will also make the data available once a quarter so that we can check the accuracy of the tape’s data insuring completeness and accuracy of your backups.

 

This is an additional Service. The monthly charge for any clients who would like to take advantage of this program will be $165.00 per month.  For all of you who continue to discuss Disaster Recovery without making any real decisions, this would be a great way to start.

 

 

Working Together:

 

In order for us to offer you the best support possible, it is very important that we make sure everyone works within our Service Structure. Outlined below are a few problems that we have been experiencing lately. Please take a moment to read thru these and feel free to give Joe Mari a call with any questions.

 

  1. Placing Service Calls:

Too often, we have clients trying to bypass the infrastructure that has been put in place for placing service calls. All service calls must be placed via the Service Call center on our Web Site. The only exception to this should be in the event that you do not have internet access. If you lose Internet access call 978-356-8888 and hit 0. The messages left on this extension get picked up every 15 minutes and then placed into the service call que. Too many people are trying to reach the technicians directly via phone or direct email. The technicians have been instructed to ignore any and all calls placed to them in this manner. Therefore, Please be advised that any calls placed in any manner other than the Web Site or extension 0, will not be returned.

  1. New Installations or Upgrades:

We receive a great deal of requests each day to add or remove users, perform software updates or perform a number of tasks that are certainly included in RAMP. However, most of these tasks are not considered emergencies and we cannot perform them during normal business hours and still support all of the service calls that we receive each day.

Going forward, all non critical requests will be performed between the hours of 4:00 and 5:30P.M. We will schedule techs and days to perform these tasks and we will notify you of when they can and will be performed.

In relation to this, if your systems are required to be restarted or shut down during any of these upgrades/ installations, you must be able to shut down during these periods. Requests to perform these tasks after hours will be accommodated. However, you will be billed at the after hours rate if this is requested.

  1. PDA’s

We have been getting a large number of calls recently regarding the support and/or setup of PDA’s. While we are happy to assist anyone with these issues, they are not part of the RAMP agreement. If you would like to add PDA’s to your support agreements, please contact Joe Mari. Any future support for PDA’s not under agreement will be considered Time and Material and you will be billed separately for this support.

 

 

We believe that these new changes and improvements will help us to continue to provide a first class Service Product to our clients.

 

If you would like information about any of the items mentioned above, please call Joe Mari at 978-356-8888 ext 230 or email joe@jmkssi.com.