After Hours and Expedited IT Support

Our primary IT support is from iPower.  They provide us with technical support between 8:30 and 6:30 each work day. 

 During normal hours, they have 30 minutes to respond to your tickets.  This can be improved by indicating in your request that you need priority service.  There are two ways. 

 If you create a ticket using the iPower icon on your office PC, you’ll see an “importance” flag in the top menu of the ticket box.  There are Low, Normal, High, and Emergency.  Pick the one that suits your need best, but be judicious. 

If you create a ticket using the email address (support@goipower.com), use one of those same terms in your subject line.  There is no need to use “Normal” if it is a normal request.  That’s automatic.

There are times when we must have support for a genuine business need outside regular hours.  This is expensive, so it needs to be approved by Mitch Burnstein, Sonja, or me.  When you have an “emergency” need outside business hours, do the following:

 Send an email to all of these addresses:

a.      support@goipower.com

b.      ehockman@wsh-law.com

c.      mburnstein@wsh-law.com

d.      SChaves@wsh-law.com

e.      jpavao@goipower.com

Describe your issue in the email as clearly as you can and include your contact telephone number where you can be reached immediately.  If we can’t reach you, we’re going to assume it wasn’t really that important and move on to other things.

Describe the reason that you need immediate assistance.  For example, it’s 9 p.m., you can’t connect remotely, and you have a very important call, meeting, or hearing first thing in the morning that you need to prepare for. 

4.      Mitch, Sonja, or I will respond approving it or calling you to find out more.  This is why we need detail in the request – it takes time to call you and find out what it going on. Once approved, iPower will work to find someone to cover it.

5.      Be patient, especially on the weekends (for Type A personalities, “patience” doesn’t mean waiting five minutes and then flipping out).  We don’t check email constantly.  iPower is not staffed to work on our needs after hours, either, but they do have coverage.  It’s first-come-first-served.

6.      If you’ve been patient – really, patient – and nothing has happened, you can call me on my cell phone.  305-877-8556.  I do not mind, except at 2 in the morning.  I spend a majority of my time working to support this firm either as a lawyer or as the office geek and you are my second family.  I will always help you if I can.

TIPS:

·        If you know you need to work remotely, make sure you have connection instructions with you for both your PC and Termserv.  Termserv is a generic connection that emulates a PC and gives you access to a lot of firm software and network drives.  If your office PC shuts down for any reason, you may need Termserv as a backup.  Know how to connect to it.  The office managers should have instructions.  Before you leave, make sure your PC is on.  You can log out of it, that won’t matter, but it does need to be on to connect.

·        Remember: most PC and network issues can be solved by a reboot.  That includes rebooting your router equipment if the problem is a remote connection issue.  There’s no trick to that, just unplug all your network devices, wait about 30 seconds, then power them up.  Also reboot your PC, laptop, phone, iPad, tablet, Surface, whatever. 

·        If you have basic internet, get the kids to stop streaming movies and music, which can really use up your bandwidth.