Technical Support Contracts available from Cannon Computing / Cumana

Ask yourself these questions of your current ICT Support Service:

• Do you really get good value for money with your current technician’s?
• Do they really get the jobs done, is the job list completed each visit to your satisfaction?
• Do you need more hours a week? … or do you need more productive hours a week?
• Are all jobs undertaken or are you given the excuse that another company has to sort it out?
• Does your technician have in-depth technical knowledge of the network infrastructure?
• Many schools have two companies for support, one on a regular basis , one as backup. Is this really a good thing under the current economic climate?
• Asked for system changes but told you can’t have it because of the way things have been installed?
• Does your technician install software from a central point or do they insist it’s done manually on each machine? And doesn’t it take a long time?…..!!
• Does your technician carry out day-to-day operational management, monitoring and appropriate maintenance of your ICT curriculum network?
• Could your current technician cope with recovery of the network infrastructure in the event of failure?
• Will your technician have trade & security tools together with repair CDs to tackle a range of technical jobs?
• When it is required, does your technician have the immediate additional support of a company who have dedicated 25 years to educational ICT,
a company with all the resources to ensure a conclusion to any ICT problem?


Support contracts start from as little as £270 ex vat. Give our company a call today 01279 730800 or e-mail me back to ntaylor@cumana.co.uk and see how we could make a difference to your school.
 

Cannon Computing / Cumana are an independent educational supplier of IT hardware, consumables, software, networking, consultancy & support – in short a full curriculum ICT supplier.   

We are increasingly finding that the 'best guess' number of hours chosen by schools can vary in reality, subject to the needs of the school, the age of the equipment, the outbreak of exceptional viruses and whether or not other technician schemes assist you.

We define our contracts, based purely on person hours, rather than 'sessions' or the perception of 1, 2 or 3 years.    Buying more hours will attract a bigger discount and you will be price protected until your time expires, even if our rates are increased during that time.

So, although our hourly rates are higher than some schemes, we generally take less time to do jobs and thus your actual annual costs will usually be lower if you opt for a total Cannon Computing / Cumana support package.    Additionally, in schools that we provide normal support for, we actively introduce free enhancements and upgrades to your network from time-to-time, as we develop them.    These enhancements are not generally available to the schools for whom we only provide a 'mop-up' support service.

We have generally provided support on a 'request' basis; when you have ICT jobs that need doing, you call us in.    Generally this has been to install new software and look at problems, this seems to work well and we believe most customers are satisfied with this service however we are also increasing providing 'regular' visit support packages to offer : weekly, fortnightly or monthly visits to tackle these day-to-day ICT issues.    Without our intervention, these day-to-day issues have been found to build up in some schools and then take us a great deal of time to 'mop-up'.

Key benefits with the Cannon Computing / Cumana support Package :

Use of our mobile phones (not the school office phone) when needing to resolve school issues.  This reduces your telephone costs but is also more efficient as we can discuss a problem whilst at the problem system AND continue to work whilst on the phone, saving you technician time overall.

Goods ordered & products repaired will often be delivered to your school in person and FREE of carriage, subject to urgency and technician availability.

All Cannon Computing / Cumana staff regularly working as technicians in school, have police clearance.

Some examples of the main jobs we normally undertake include :

1. The general day-to-day problems that may arise around your school.
2. Extra work you may require leading up to an inspection : OFSTED / HMI / LA etc.
3. Adding/removing software.
4. Installing hardware.
5. Adding users to the network.
6. Rebuilding machines (Hardware / Software).
7. Setting up any equipment, Adding printers, scanners etc.

In Addition we also do the following:

• Checking to confirm your Anti-Virus software is updating & functioning correctly & dealing with any viruses that may occur, if they can not been automatically dealt with.
• Checking logs to confirm your server tape backups are functioning correctly & taking remedial action when appropriate.  New cleaning and data tapes can be supplied if required.
• When suspected, perform manual scanning for Spyware & discuss mechanisms to introduce automated Anti-Spyware applications if a recurrent threat exists.
• Give PCs & servers a low level defragmentation & disc clean to improve their speed.
• Introduce ways of keeping machines on the network regularly updated and clean to maintain continued performance.
• Installing Windows Updates, service packs etc.
• Cleaning Mouse Balls, as required, for smoother operation.

PLEASE NOTE OTHER SERVICES AVAILABLE FROM US:

• We provide consumable items such as inks, toners, paper, mice etc….

• We provide Wireless Networking, Structured CAT5e networking solutions, benching and bespoke security systems.

• We supply PCs, Laptops, Laptop Security Trolleys, Printers, Whiteboards and Projectors etc….Its not just the support we do, we can offer the complete ‘one stop’ service.

• We provide repair services both onsite (where appropriate) and offsite.    Where practicable and providing we are notified the previous working day, we will endeavour to bring spares with us to attempt onsite repairs within a scheduled support visit.

• We offer a ‘Pit-Stop’ regular drop in service for customers who wish us to be responsible for ensuring tape backups actually happen on servers.    We can arrange to come in, change the tape, ensure the previous backup was successful and run the cleaning tape when required.

• We have solutions for cutting down on technical support time, such as, using the Symantec Ghost software to deploy curriculum software around the PCs / Laptops on a network and to re-build corrupted PCs when necessary.

• We can reduce your costs and increase network PC consistency by using our ‘Ghost’ skills to efficiently deploy new software.    Typically you will only pay for less than an hours technical time to install and deploy, for example Flowol 2 + mimics, to 30+ PCs around a school network or indeed upgrade to the latest Target Tracker around a whole school.

•  NB. In some cases Ghost packages might require PCs to be left on overnight, as some larger software updates / installs can take a few hours to deploy throughout the network.

• We can also offer the facility of holding computer images of machines that have been put into your school curriculum network.  So, if a machine is beyond software repair, we can restore it to an original image within minutes and then quickly deploy all relevant software to it.

• We can provide both hardware and support for your admin network and systems running SIMS.  We do recommend that you keep a basic level of software update support with your SIMS supplier but we will be happy to support the day-to-day needs of the admin system, as we do curriculum.

•  We can offer remote dial-in support for your server & PCs, subject to infrastructure, this will incur some additional charges.

 “WE CONTINUE TO PROVIDE A LEVEL OF SUPPORT BEYOND THAT OF MANY OF OUR COMPETITORS AS THEY OFTEN HAVE TO CALL US IN TO RESOLVE PROBLEMS”

If you require further information on our contracts and would like to discuss our SLA (Service Level Agreement) then please contact us on 01279 730800 or e-mail ntaylor@cumana.co.uk