New Era Technology – Education Products
Service Level Agreement Support and Service Levels

This document outlines the agreed levels of service provided by New Era to the Customer in relation to the following Education products: DB Primary, SchoolPing, Websites and Able+ Cloud

1. SLA Overview

1.1. The platform is designed to be available 365 days a year. New Era endeavour to guarantee this for 99.99%. This time excludes planned maintenance windows which are notified in advance to the Customer Nominated Contact and published on the New Era Status Page.
1.2. For this agreement, technical breaks in service not exceeding three minutes shall not be deemed to amount to non-access, provided no more than two breaks occur within one hour.
1.3. This agreement excludes access to the Product/s denied as a result of failures of:
1.3.1. Equipment or services not operated or provided by New Era.
1.3.2. Equipment or services operated or provided by the Customer.
1.3.3. Events beyond the reasonable control of New Era including but not limited to events of Force Majeure.
1.4. New Era will provide the Customer with:
1.4.1. Telephone and email support for all Nominated Contacts within the Customer organisation.
1.4.2. Telephone support available Monday to Friday 8:30am to 5:00pm (UK times) excluding public holidays and 3 working days between Christmas and New Year.
1.4.3. Committed response times to reported issues.
1.4.4. Regular feedback on reported issues outlining progress and/or resolution.
1.4.5. Issue escalation management to ensure timely responses.

2. Service Monitoring

2.1. Services are monitored by our automated monitoring and our systems team 24 x 7 x 365 days a year. Many types of fault may be detected in this manner, although due to the nature of some issues it may not be possible to detect them remotely. It is expected that Priority1 faults would be detected in most instances.

2.2. Where a Priority 1 issue is detected by our Systems team, the Customer will be notified via our Status page of the situation and resolution times. During the above working hours, the Customer emergency contacts may also be alerted by email, text or telephone calls.

2.3. For issues detected and logged by New Era on behalf of the Customer, any measurement of downtime will begin at the point that contact is established with the Customer.

3. Nominated Service Contacts

3.1. The Customer should provide New Era with at least one nominated contact designated as an emergency contact and provide for that contact an appropriate email address and mobile telephone number, for the purposes of contact and communication during a major outage or interruption to service.

3.2. The Customer may provide, or be requested to provide to New Era, other nominated contacts for support or account management purposes. These will be retained and updated by New Era based on the information provided by the organisation subject to relevant data protection guidance and requirements.

3.3. It is the Customer’s responsibility to ensure New Era is notified of changes to details of the nominated contacts.

4. Support/Service Desk

4.1. The Service Desk is the primary point of contact for all incident logging, requests or queries relating to the services being provided. The Support Desk is accessed via the New Era Support Line, email or the support website.

4.2 Hours of cover

The Service Desk is available during the hours of 8:30am to 5:00pm (UK times), Monday to Friday, excluding Public Holidays and 3 working days between Christmas and New Year. The services provided by New Era are designed to be available and operational 24 hours a day, 52 weeks a year. Calls may be logged 24 hours a day for 365 days per year, but calls raised out of hours will be dealt with on the first working day after receipt.
4.3. Site unavailability

Should our services become unavailable outside of normal working hours, the new Era on-call systems team will be alerted, and access will be restored ASAP. New Era operates a 24/7 52 weeks a year on-call team.
4.4. Incident logging

For New Era to provide an effective support service, it is important to provide as much information as possible to assist in the diagnosis of the problem. Queries may be logged via telephone, email or the support website.
At the point of logging the query the Customer must provide full and accurate details of the problem being reported including:

• Date and time of occurrence
• Details of the problem experienced or what was trying to be achieved
• What was the user doing?
• What was the outcome?
• Any error messages displayed
• Provide screenshots where possible
• Frequency / scale of the problem
• Number of users affected
• Username
• Details of operating environment and versions of software being used

4.5. Queries logged by telephone

Once the full details have been provided, New Era will:

• Log the call within the support ticket system.
• Assign a ticket priority, based on the query classifications.
• Provide a reference, ticket priority and time of call logging (by email).
• Perform 1st line troubleshooting and diagnostics with the help of the caller to attempt to resolve the problem or gather enough information to do so after the call.
If the query cannot be resolved during the initial telephone conversation, the query will be placed in the support queue, and dealt with according to query priority. The caller will be contacted with query updates and resolution, according to the issue handling procedures described below.

4.6. Queries logged by Email
4.6.1 Email queries are automatically logged in the support ticketing system and an automated reply with the ticket number will be sent. Details of access to the ticketing system will also be provided to allow the Customer to track the issue online.
4.6.2 The query will then be dealt with according to call priority. The caller will be contacted with query updates and resolution, according to the ticket handling procedures described below.
4.6.3 If the problem is logged by email and the issue is not clear or further information is required, the Customer will be contacted by telephone and /or email to clarify the query before the query is accepted and progressed.
4.6.4 If the email is received outside support working hours, New Era will treat the email is if it had been received at the start of the next working day.
4.6.5 The Customer will be provided with log in details into the support ticketing system and can track changes online to their logged issue(s). Using this login, the Customer may respond to questions from New Era support staff, close or re-open tickets or upload supporting documents.

4.7. Automatic closure of tickets
Following x2 auto-reminders (one every 5 working days) if New Era is unable to contact the Customer, or the Customer does not respond to requests for information, for a period of 10 working days calls will be closed by the Service Desk.
4.8. Issue Handling

All issues are allocated a ticket priority by New Era at the time of logging or identification. Below is a description of the priorities.

Priorities are determined by New Era based on a matrix of impact and emergency.
Impact: A measure of the number of users affected

Impact
Description
1 – HighOrganisation wide impact
2 – MediumMultiple users affected. Single organisation
3 – LowOne user affected
Urgency: A measure of how severely the business operation has been affected
Urgency
Description
1 – HighBusiness operation has stopped
Immediate impact on the Customer
The Customer is unable to work
The Customer is unable to meet statutory requirements Safeguarding implications
2 – MediumOperational, however some function(s) have stopped
3 – LowInconvenience to business operation Service request

Priority Matrix

Impact/Urgency
Urgency 1
Urgency 2
Urgency 3
Impact 1Priority 1Priority 2Priority 4
Impact 2Priority 2Priority 3Priority 4
Impact 3Priority 3Priority 4Priority 4

4.9 Target Resolution Times
New Era will undertake to resolve all issues as quickly and efficiently as possible and sets the following target times:

Priority
Example
Fix Time
Escalation
1Service unavailable to all users1 hour

CTO- immediately

CEO- 15 minutes

2Service available but major impact on a significant portion of the service, e.g. email outage, messaging service
Repetitive, intermittent faults in service delivery
8 hoursCustomer Support Manager
– Immediately
CTO – 1 hour
CEO – 7 hours
3Service available but minor issue affecting a small number of users3 working daysCustomer Support Manager
– 1 days
4Service available but advice / changes sought, e.g. Deleting accounts, Statistics requests10 working daysCustomer Support Manager
– 5 days

During normal service conditions, New Era would expect most issues to be allocated a Priority 3 or Priority 4 status.
Any issue or request requiring a New Era release, will be subject to the normal release schedule.
If an issue is caused by a known problem, a work around will be given, and the specific incident closed. The underlying fix to the problem may be dependent upon a further software release, which will be subject to the usual release procedures and timescales.

4.10. Standard maintenance windows
New Era operates standard maintenance windows when the New Era Services may be unavailable for a period, between the hours of:
20:00 – 06:00 (UK times) on Weekdays
18:00 – 10:00 (UK times) on Weekends
There may be other rare instances where New Era wishes to perform planned maintenance outside the windows shown above and which may lead to a temporary reduced level of service.
Where possible, New Era will endeavour to perform non-essential maintenance activities during academic holiday periods. Service outages caused by planned maintenance are not measured as downtime under this SLA.

5. Data Backup

All data pertaining to the software is backed up by New Era every 24 hours for the purposes of disaster recovery by New Era only. For avoidance of doubt, this shall not entitle the Customer to obtain copies of any data held by New Era for these purposes.

6. Security incidents

New Era reserves the right to remotely disconnect services for any user accounts, devices, site or sites where there is reason to believe that their presence on the network constitutes a significant risk to the integrity, legality or performance of the network, especially where such risk is spread across or threatens multiple customers.
Examples of such situations are:

• Accounts or sites being used to host illegal or unsuitable content, whether intentionally or otherwise (examples include pornography, promotion of criminal activity, abusive or offensive material).

• Sites infected with viruses, posing a threat to other sites of the same, and other Customers.

• Devices or sites participating in any attempt to hack or perform a Denial of Service attack.

• Email accounts used to send spam mail.

Where New Era deems it necessary to deactivate accounts, site services or devices, New Era will attempt to contact both the site and the organisation. In the event that contact cannot be made, the accounts, site services or devices will be deactivated, and messages left. Services will be reinstated once the risk has been removed to New Era’s satisfaction.

About us

New Era Technology's managed services, cloud, collaboration, data networking, security solutions help more than 20,000 worldwide customers adapt to a rapidly changing digital world, increase productivity and enhance learning experiences.

 

Stay in touch

Email us to get interesting news and updates delivered to your inbox.

© 2024 New Era Technology  |  Privacy Policy   |  Cookie Policy   |  Modern Slavery Statement