IT Services Update - 15th September 2020

Welcome back to everyone, and welcome to the first IT services update. I'll be writing these regularly, publishing them here on the helpdesk, and then sending the link to all headteachers and school admin leads. I'll be trying to wrap most updates, news and other general communication into these posts, so hopefully you find them useful.

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September is always a challenging time and I know that IT issues cause major problems your staff and students. I'm very mindful that they can have a significant impact on both teaching and learning and the operation of your schools.

I'm also acutely aware that at many, or even most, schools that are part of our trust IT is commonly a point of pain. The IT that we have in our schools today is, in too many cases, a source of pain and disruption rather than systems that assist staff, learners and the school as a whole. Rest assured that I'll be working extremely hard over the coming year to bring significant improvements to bear on this.

Everyone so far has been incredibly understanding of where IT currently is and I cannot thank you all enough for the wonderful welcome I've had to BDMAT. I know that a few of our schools have now met Marc Humphries, our new Senior IT Technician, and we'll be visiting the remaining schools over the coming weeks.

At present many of the issues are taking much longer to resolve than they should due to the systems that we've inherited. We will be working to resolve the underlying problems wherever possible so please understand that there may not be quick fixes for some issues.

These first couple of weeks have been incredibly busy with issues from account creation to servers not responding and everything in between. The contact details for logging IT support issues are below, and I've listed a few points that I'd ask all staff to bear in mind when requesting support.

There is also a poster attached to this article (link at the bottom of the page) for you to place around school should you wish.

Kind Regards,

Austen Puleston
Head of IT

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Help us provide better IT support

Contact Information

We use a ticketing system to make sure that all requests are tracked and attended to. In order to help us help you, please submit any IT related issue to the helpdesk either via email (support@bdmat.org.uk) or online (https://support.bdmat.org.uk/).

Note: this email address used to be support@bdmat.uk. That address still works and will continue to work alongside the support@bdmat.org.uk address.

Please only raise an issue once

Please resist the temptation to chase issues that have been logged on the helpdesk by sending duplicate emails. If would like an update or want to add additional information then please reply to the latest response that you have from us. New emails chasing issues just add an additional ticket to the queue for us to track and resolve.

If you wish to check the status of an issue at any point, you can register or log in with your school email address here:

https://support.bdmat.org.uk/hc/en-gb

We cannot delete issues from the helpdesk. Once raised there is no way for us to remove it from the list other than to solve it so please be aware that, although at the moment it might take us longer than we’d like, it will be solved.

Please create a separate ticket for each issue

If you have multiple IT problems, it really helps us if you are able to send a separate email, or create a separate ticket for each one. This way we can track and reply to them separately.

Please be as descriptive as possible

The more information about your problem you can include, the faster we’ll be able to solve it. Things that really help us include:

• What are you trying to do?
• What should happen?
• What’s happening instead?
• What have you tried to fix or troubleshoot it?
• Who else is affected?
• How often does this issue arise?

Please raise the issue yourself

It helps use immensely if we can talk directly to the person who has the issue. We will reply to you, so please check your email for replies from us, or visit the helpdesk online (https://support.bdmat.org.uk) to check for updates.

We can assign additional access to Headteachers and/or member of staff nominated by the headteacher, so that they can see the status of all IT issues raised across the organisation.

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