Support & maintenance

Albacore provide unlimited telephone and on-site support services. Whether you have 2 or 200 users, those users can contact the Albacore helpdesk for technical support of their devices. Our helpdesk operates from 09:00 – 17:30 Monday to Friday (excluding public holidays). Calls are generally passed straight to a first line support engineer who will understand the issue and take ownership of it, involving colleagues or other suppliers as required to provide the fastest possible resolution.

Should a problem require a visit, Albacore provide either 4 business hour or 8 business hour response times. We deliver on-site support to our customers using our own engineers and have our own fleet of Albacore vehicles. We aim to provide continuity of engineering support wherever possible, so the same engineer who handled the initial call is likely to be dispatched to visit your site where that is required.

Our on-site support options include unlimited parts and labour. We hold stocks of parts for desktops and servers and we will replace parts on-site at our cost as part of our support service. Should a desktop or server require an off-site repair or develop a fault that requires a replacement unit, we would provide a swap-out unit of equivalent specification. This swap-out unit would be commissioned by our engineer on-site and we would ensure the users have all the software and functionality they had in their previous solution, limited only by the availability of the backup solution in place.

To provide this unlimited and comprehensive support service to our customers, we have extensive capabilities for remote access and monitoring.

On server hardware, we ensure each server we supply is equipped with full hands-off management capabilities. These allow us to provide remote support of the server at close to the same level as being on-site. This hands-off management also provides essential hardware diagnostics and monitoring and has alerting capabilities to ensure pro-active management of server components is maintained.

All machines supported by Albacore have our comprehensive remote monitoring and management tools installed. These tools take the form of an agent running locally on each device, reporting to a central Albacore portal. The agent currently provides us with real time monitoring of over 150 different machine conditions, with actions and alerting resulting from each of those conditions. We also have remote access to machines from the portal via the agent. This allows us to analyse resource usage on each device in very significant detail. Command line, remote desktop and quick remote access from our engineers is built into the portal. The agent even provides us with the ability to restart certain features of a device pro-actively and remotely.

Many of the conditions we monitor are pro-actively managed and resolved through automation. This ensures supported machines run smoothly and common support issues are managed and resolved without user interaction. This ensures our customers spend more time doing their jobs and less time working with us on routine IT issues. We also have Albacore engineer resource dedicated to processing and actioning alerts generated from customer devices. This ensures that issues generated by the monitoring system where no automation is possible are worked on to ensure a pro-active resolution.

Another key feature of our support and maintenance services is update management. We manage and deliver updates across all Albacore supported machines. This management does not end at a simple monthly roll-out – we review all Windows updates before release to ensure there are no reported issues. It is only then that we will release updates for installation on all machines. If we are made aware of an issue with a certain Windows update, we will immediately pause deployment of this update across all machines. We can also easily review which updates are installed on any supported machine. We can also prioritise and ensure timely deployment of critical packages when we are made aware of them. As well as Windows updates, we also manage deployment of updates for other commonly used software packages.

Our unlimited approach means that while we work pro-actively, remotely and utilise automation to ensure the security and functionality of customers systems, we also remain fully available to our customers via telephone or email channels. This combination ensures that customer issues are fully investigated and managed in a timely manner and to a satisfactory conclusion.

Please feel free to contact us by completing the form on the contact link below, and let us help to move your IT forward.