Educational institutions of all types have very busy IT demands and are often operating in an environment where there is a solid mix of legacy and new equipment and technology. Geographically separate campuses add complexity to operations, and highly transient student and staffing environment adds to the challenges of the educational IT worker.
Challenges
Students
- High student numbers, high turn-over rate of "clients"
- Supporting a very-large number of different devices. Schools are increasingly dealing with multiple laptop/computer/device per student. These are in
constant need of helpdesk / technical attention
- Students submitting "helpdesk" calls at the end of lunch, or into class time
- Time-sensitive technical challenges
Staff
- Staff are supporting a wide-range of technical environments
- Distance between work-sites is often an issue. Geographically
distributed campus can require travel, remote access and effective time
management
- Staff often need to divide their time between supporting other staff and teachers, and the students
- Support at a school can often be a broad mix of helpdesk,
facilities management, training, service delivery and faculty
administration
Solutions
Implement the client-web self-service module. Students (and staff)
can log-on via the web from anywhere and log a new ticket, or check on
the status of an existing ticket. Many schools often have some sort of
intranet in existence (Sharepoint, CMS, custom etc). By building custom
web-forms into an existing intranet, or internet website, staff and
students can fill in details of service requests, room bookings, loan
materials etc. This information is either logged directly into
HelpMaster via custom API development, or emailed to the Email Manager
where the details of the job are scanned, filtered, parsed and created
as a job.