Support companies for your school's IT - Quick poll

[nikaso]

Our school has an IT support contract with a company which is coming up for renewal (annual contract) but I have noticed on here some edugeekers do everything in-house so wanted to get an idea how common this was.

 

Basically does your school have a support contract with either a company or LA IT team to support the in-school IT staff with issues?

[DalekSec]

All in house here, only thing that really is outsourced is our main MF printers.

[RLR]

I think it will depend on the size of the school. We have a team of 7 to support our 6 Schools which are spread across the city.

[sllorep]

Large Upper and Sixth Form (Secondary+Higher) here and all in-house.

[Techie2000]

Primary School, 2 form entry - all in house.

[dry]

Large primary here. All in-house (1 FT technician)

 

School has historically had support contracts but they were soon ditched when they turned in to:

 

"Hi, I'm here for the on-site hours of your support contract. How are things going?"

"Fine."

"Cool, well I'll be off then. See you next term"

[Sephiroth]

We have a fully managed service for our Macs (integrated with Windows AD Domain), and we get SIMS support from our LA. Almost everything else is done in house, though we're looking at getting a support contract for anything high level taht we don't have time to deal with or fault find (e.g. file server failure; VM cluster/ backup repairs...). We're a team of 3.5 (IT Manager [FT], Network Tech [FT] and 2 IT/Expressive Arts Techs [FT, TTO]) in a school of 2000 students.

[speckytecky]

All in house here apart from the fact I'd be all at sea many a time if it weren't for Edugeek

 

Additionally I do have call on a superb Apple expert based in Weston Super Mare for that added extra support on our small fleet of Macs and also a Windows expert who used to be a school's IT Tech but set himself up as a consultant now based in Swindon. Both highly recommended by myself.

[dblight]

We are all in house for our MAT. However we do have a retainer with a big MS partner if we should need it. It also allows us access to MS courses at a reduced cost. This helps us become MS certified ourselves to improve in house skills Edited October 18, 2016 by dblight

[FN-GM]

All in house at our MAT - infact we provide services for other schools.

[Lonix]

All in house, once was external support but too costly and lacked decent support/progress.

[TechMonkey]

Well we have both. All in-house but have a support contract for things we either don't have the time for or for real emergencies, a backstop effectively.

[nikaso]

Wow, I didn't realise so many schools did it all in-house. As mentioned our IT contract is actually shortly up for renewal and costs us a lot of money but we rarely use it as we tend to deal with almost everything in house. That said I would like some form of escalation service in case we run into something we can't work out for ourselves but maybe not the all-singing (and expensive) contract we have now.

 

Thanks

Nick

Edited October 18, 2016 by nikaso

[kennysarmy]

I don't think it's as easy as the poll suggests.

 

We manage most stuff in-house but our virtual infrastructure, backup, wireless and copiers are all covered by hardware and support contracts.

 

But if I have an issue with say imaging or day-to-day problems I'm on my own to solve....

[Geoff]

I'm not working at a school however it might interest people how commercial works:

 

We have full next day extended warranties on hardware. We have 4 hour SLAs on really important infrastructure like the Servers, SANs, Core Switches, Firewalls, etc.

We have software support contracts for critical stuff. So basically there's always someone we can phone and we're never 'on our own'. i.e. if Citrix is broken I can ring our support company. If I can't get the MDT server working that's my problem.

 

So in summary. If it's required to work with minimum / no downtime then it's got a support contract and hardware warranty. If it's just 'nice to have' or 'we can manage without it for a few days' then it probably only the hardware has a warranty. Some of the random homebrew stuff doesn't even have that of course, but why should it.

 

The other thing to note is we spread our risk around. So we don't end up with one company supporting us for everything. That way we can shop for price and also don't get blackmailed into higher prices on renewal or end up a creek without a paddle if the support company goes tits.

Edited October 18, 2016 by Geoff

[foofighterjim]

I don't think it's as easy as the poll suggests.

 

We manage most stuff in-house but our virtual infrastructure, backup, wireless and copiers are all covered by hardware and support contracts.

 

But if I have an issue with say imaging or day-to-day problems I'm on my own to solve....

 

Pretty much the same here.

[LTurner692]

Mainly all In house, have a few upper schools in the trust which allows us to swap people around to support what we need, So far its all been okay.

[HBPS]

all in house 2fe going 3fe and picking up another school as of april.

[nikaso]

I don't think it's as easy as the poll suggests..

 

I agree, I did think about doing a more comprehensive set of responses but just decided a quick and dirty poll was enough for a quick overview.

[pcstru]

I don't think it's as easy as the poll suggests.

Same here. We have a number of support contracts for specific systems (surely everyone has a support contract for their MIS system!) but we do not contract out support generally. Even where we do have some external support, we tend to be the first point of contact so often enough we know what the solution is or can solve it quicker than it takes to call it in. We do have an agreement with a local networking company which gives us good rates on cabling, a bit of telephone support (I think up to 10 hours a year) and substantially reduced rates if we need to call them out. On the few occasions when we have had to call on it, the problems are generally so 'difficult' that there is a reasonable chance they will be stumped.

[gtg93]

I work for a support company, however I'm curious as to how large these primaries are that require a full-time tech (or multiple)?

 

I'm in no way saying you've got it easy or aren't needed, I'm just curious, as most of my schools get half day a week, barring one that I'd classify as a large primary that has a full day and this works fine (they get the odd callout when it's needed, but usually that's few and far between). If I had a full week at any of these I'd literally be twiddling my thumbs.

[HBPS]

460 kids 55 staff in my main school at the moment i do a lot of staff training. on top of prepping for 3fe with our new build been here nearly a year and saved them more than my salary by not just buying from their old support provider that was marking prices up beyond belief.... no offence

 

I work for a support company, however I'm curious as to how large these primaries are that require a full-time tech (or multiple)?

 

I'm in no way saying you've got it easy or aren't needed, I'm just curious, as most of my schools get half day a week, barring one that I'd classify as a large primary that has a full day and this works fine (they get the odd callout when it's needed, but usually that's few and far between). If I had a full week at any of these I'd literally be twiddling my thumbs.

[pantscat]

That's an interesting question @gtg93 - as someone that provides support, too - I'm curious.

 

Is it a case that employed staff get pulled into more than just regular support? I know that in some of my previous schools as an IT Manager I'd often get pulled into other things, from training to project management to who knows what!

[gtg93]

460 kids 55 staff in my main school at the moment i do a lot of staff training. on top of prepping for 3fe with our new build been here nearly a year and saved them more than my salary by not just buying from their old support provider that was marking prices up beyond belief.... no offence

 

None taken, it's not something we do to be honest... I'm not the one who sets prices etc, but as far as I can tell we're extremely competitive (generally V low priced) - however I do get that... A few companies in the area are very bad for this, and it does give support providers a bad name.

 

Sounds like a busy time for you, however once the new build is complete and you've moved do you not see your workload dropping a lot? Or is it a matter of moving onto the next project?

 

 

 

That's an interesting question @gtg93 - as someone that provides support, too - I'm curious.

 

Is it a case that employed staff get pulled into more than just regular support? I know that in some of my previous schools as an IT Manager I'd often get pulled into other things, from training to project management to who knows what!

 

I guess this is a fair point - we do get involved in this stuff a bit, but I'd imagine not to the extent as if you was onsite all the time.

[zoohead]

We are a team of 2 supporting over 2000 users and have been in house since dumping RM in 2011. We have just purchased Retained Technical Services and Telephone support from an external company. The money paid into the RTS pot never expires and can be used for any sort of support required from 4hr onsite to migration services (charged at the appropriate daily rates).