NeCTAR’s shortlist was quite extensive - they took inputs from their peers and added some industry leaders like Freshdesk, Zendesk and Landesk as well. It had to be on the cloud." Wilfred let on. It had to fulfil certain parts of the ITIL stack. It had to be flexible enough that our own people could configure and change the workflows and do things in it rather than have consultants come in to do it. We had a list or requirements - multiple channels, more than email – phone, chat, portal, mobile, multi-tenancy. ![]() "When I came on board we already had some requirements in place for the support tool. Before Freshdesk, NeCTAR’s support situation was very different. But all of this, the tiered approach to support, is relatively recent. We’re, I suppose, multiple.", says Nick.Īnd of course, there’s Tier 0 or self-service as they like to call it. We’re not a traditional single organisation. We just concentrate on the core services we support. However, these groups have their own individual portals. "For instance, there’s a High Performance Computing group, a Storage Service group, all of whom are using our service as a part of our organisational aim of providing e-research support. The nodes do tier 1 support for users, tier 2 support is provided by the distributed helpdesk and tier 3 goes to specialised experts. They are a federation of 8 nodes (organisations and institutions) distributed over 7 states, running OpenStack. NeCTAR’s support situation is unique, to say the least. So, one of our challenges when we were choosing a helpdesk was to make sure it flows nicely even though we’ve got all these slices of people doing support." The other 45 are Sysadmins from tier 3 organisational groups and a couple of managers like Nick and I. We have approximately 65 support agents on Freshdesk, out of which 20 are federated helpdesk people. "We have about about 200 tickets a month”, Wilfred Brimblecombe, Operations Manager at NeCTAR, pitches in, “but we’ve got only about one agent on it at any time. "We were getting about 400 tickets a month in our previous system but since we set up our knowledge base, this number has dropped to about 150-200 tickets a month." On structuring the support team But the channel that has really impacted our support is the knowledge base." "Since we’ve switched to Freshdesk,” Nick confides, “we’ve seen an increase in chat, which people use to connect with us and ask questions directly. Even though it was open source software that had been customised for their environment, they felt the shortcoming keenly. The tool they were using, Request Tracker was not set up to support other channels. Previously, users could get in touch with NeCTAR’s support team only over email. That’s something we weren’t able to do earlier." And we can reply to them quickly using phone or chat. If the issue impacts production, they quickly hop onto chat and let us know they’ve submitted a ticket. ![]() People submit a ticket through the portal or they email the support address. "The most common support channel”, says Nick Golovachenko, Support Manager at NeCTAR, “is email. ![]() A siloed email-only environmentĮstablished under the Australian government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), NeCTAR supports its research scientists through email, phone, chat and a portal which includes a knowledge base and discussion forums. ![]() NeCTAR is broken up into programs of work - NeCTAR Virtual Labs which are rich, domain-oriented online environments that draw together research data, models, analysis tools and workflows and NeCTAR Research Cloud That provides computing infrastructure, software and services that allow Australia’s research community to access and share computational models, tools, data and collaboration environments. The National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources project (NeCTAR) provides an online infrastructure to help researchers connect with colleagues in Australia and around the world, allowing them to collaborate and share ideas and research outcomes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |