• Home
• Development
• Design
• CMS
• Hosting
• About/Contact
• Blog
• Support

Client Help

Existing clients can locate our help and support services from here.

Getting Support

The primary tool for not just getting things done, but getting them done in priority order and a timely manner, is our "JTrac" issue tracking system: http://support.sustainablesoftware.com.au/jtrac/. If you do not already have access, please email us a request.

It is important to use the "Priority" field on tickets to set the priority of an issue. We will generally attend to the highest priority issues first.

You can also send emails directly to support at support@sustainablesoftware.com.au to report issues. However, if you enter an initial ticket into JTrac as well (and send the link in your email), you will save us some time, leaving more time for us to do technical work on your systems. Hence, using the ticket system at all times (except emergencies - see below) is highly desirable.

Phone calls are the best method to report emergencies. For other issues, phone calls should only be pre-arranged and used to discuss issues in more details than can be provided by the ticket system. Why? We work with several clients, often elbow deep in complex computer code. An interruption during this can take some time to recover from. Thus we account for each unplanned phone call as a minimum of 15 minutes, even if the actual call is very short. The only exception is when the issue is an emergency, such as a system down or completely inoperable, or JTrac is not accessible.

Accessing email

Ideally, for fast and efficient email, you should use a good email client such as the excellent (and free) Mozilla Thunderbird.

Read more about setting up your client ...

Web mail can also be used: http://mail.sustainablesoftware.com.au/. Your username is your full email address (e.g. aperson@my.domain). Your password is the same as was given to you for normal email access.

Mail accounts for your domain can be administered through the Postadmin interface: http://mail.sustainablesoftware.com.au/admin/. You will need to be given access by us first, and must be authorised by your organisation to manage their email accounts.

Support arrangements

It gives us great pleasure to work for our varied and wonderful clients. If you have an existing maintenance contract, then our time is yours. Below are some guidelines on how to get the most out of your support arrangements.

It is up to you to decide how to use your allocated hours. In our experience, the best way for clients to get the most out of their time is to have a single contact to liaise with us for support. What you don't want is your time squandered by multiple people within your organisation making the same enquiries or asking for conflicting actions to be performed.

Do you need ad hoc or pre-paid support?

There are two types support to chose from — ad hoc or pre-paid. Pre-paid support is paid in advance each quarter and reserves an average number of hours per week for you. Ad hoc support can be useful if your support needs each quarter are minor and sporadic. However, as well as being more expensive, ad hoc request are executed at a lower priority than those of pre-paid clients. Pre-paid support helps us with capacity planning by ensuring that we can cater to the commitment we hold with our clients.

With pre-paid hours, timeliness is mostly assured. We work with the idea that pre-paid hours are a 'locked-in' average number of hours per week and we will as far as is humanly possible perform your requested tasks at that rate, occasionally doing more in weeks where you have urgent tasks and less if all tasks are low priority and some other customer has emergencies. If you keep presenting tasks, then we will use all of the hours in that quarter.

What happens to unused pre-paid hours?

If you completely run out of tasks for us to do, our policy is to not roll unused hours into the next quarter. We will roll hours over if it is our fault that the hours didn't get used. An example is when it is close to the end of the quarter and another client has an emergency and you have only low priority tasks. Naturally we help out the other client (as I'm sure you would want to be treated in their situation), estimate the hours you have missed out on and roll them over if we can't complete them before the end of the quarter. This is a fairly rare occurrence though and has only happened a couple of times.