Cobweb Solutions Blog - The UK's Leading Cloud Provider

Cobweb Self Service - Support in your hands!

As part of Cobweb's endeavours to improve the customer support experience, we have implemented a pilot scheme for our new Self Service Portal; together with the Cobweb Knowledge Base it forms part of a series of tools to assist you in managing your cases.

What is the Self Service Portal?

The Self Service portal is based upon CRM Accelerator technology and allows customers to view, modify and close any cases that are open with us. It provides a fast and easy to use interface accessible via any web browser or internet-enabled mobile/PDA and automatically notifies our experienced support personnel and the customer of updates and resolutions via email and online.

Self service and support communication tools are fast becoming an essential part of the customer support experience, both empowering customers who currently utilise internal ticket management systems mirroring those of our own and reducing the 'lost in translation' factor inherent in complex problem management. These systems are often costly and demand resources that can often be taken up by the Managed Service Provider as part of their support desk tools, offering a mutually beneficial ROI for both provider and host. A comprehensive article on the assimilation of such tools can be found here.

One can access the Self Service portal via a set of encrypted logon credentials, submitted to you on initial provisioning. You are then able to raise cases and view updates placed by our service desk agents:

 

If you wish to become part of this pilot scheme, please contact the Service Desk.

Pete Baughan

Level 3 Service Desk Administrator

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Sharepoint Solutions & Field Job Tracking

From a consultant perspective, I'm frequently asked how Sharepoint 3 can be utilised in specific business contexts; both existing and prospective customers have wildly varying business processes that can benefit from the system. I'd like to take a second to detail a common scenario that can be configured within this powerful piece of software and propose how we can help our customers bin the paper based method in favour of a secure, reliable and accessible online medium.

Field Job Management

One area of your business that may be reliant on a manual paper-phone-text method is that of job tracking and communication with field technicians, for example. Currently a large proportion of businesses utilise their Outlook calendar to create appointments which are then either printed out or sent via email to engineers in the field.

Sharepoint can:

* Offer a one-stop business management system, with an online calendar directly linked to user tasks and  job tracking sheets

* Directly link to your current Outlook client to integrate with your current appointment system

* Help you create a form template, that once completed kicks off a workflow informing both engineer and managers that a new job has been created

* Inform users via email, calendar, text directly to most modern mobile phones of pending jobs and appointments - no paper job sheet required

* Email the client with a proposed appointment time

* Send a digital map directly to the user in the field

The field engineer can then mark any job as 'completed' on their mobile or laptop (connected to Sharepoint) which can then trigger an invoice workflow.

In summary, Sharepoint can be configured to save time, money and resources as well as being able to offer clients the reliability and scalability inherent in a Hosted Service. Please contact us to discuss your requirements.

 

Pete Baughan

Level 3 Service Desk Administrator

Twitter

43 million tricked by ‘scareware’

You may have seen or heard this scary statistic in the news today - Symantec have revealed that 43 million people have been scared into purchasing fake anti-virus software. I've seen a couple of instances of this simple scam/trick myself, where a very believable pop-up informs you that your PC has been compromised and prompts you to purchase software to fix the issue.

In a way, it's a fraudulent/phishing technique also, as Con Mallon, from Symantec, told BBC News - "Obviously, you're losing your own hard-earned cash up front, but at the back end of that, if you're transacting with these guys online you're offering them credit card details, debit card details and other personal information," he said.

Now, there's no accounting for people that fall for fraudulent schemes, a quick look at the 419 victims will tell you that, but there are genuine ways to protect yourself against these internet-based threats. The MessageLabs Web Protect service protects you from malware and providing URL filtering on a permanent basis. Everybody has anti-virus for their PC, and you probably have a quality virus & spam filter for your email too (if you're using Cobweb Hosted Exchange then you're protected by best in the world – MessageLabs!). It makes sense that your internet connection is protected to the same levels too.

If you're interested in protecting your organisation against web based threats, talk to Cobweb as we can help you – 0845 223 9000

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain

MessageLabs publish their SLA performance

MessageLabs make some big claims regarding the effectiveness of their SLA, and here's the data to back that up.

This is data taken over the last 6 months, so it will be smoothing out any bumps that may show up on a daily/monthly basis.
http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/sla_performance?culture=en-US

They are being brave in showing this, many organisations don't, so to that end... Cobweb are next. Watch this space.

Dan - http://twitter.com/dan_germain