Support Portal Ticketing System Rolling Out

You may remember that last July we ran a trial with an Internet based ticketing system. We appreciated all of the feedback that we got; it helped a lot and now we're ready to roll it out! We've long had an internal system but there was no public face to it. In the interest of transparency and to save some trees by avoiding putting all of this information on our invoices, we're moving to the new portal. Its address is https://support.harborcomputerservices.net

Over the course of the next couple of weeks we will be contacting you to ask who you would like to have accounts. Each of the people you specify will receive a username and password for the support website and will be able to create tickets. In addition they will receive email from the site each time an update to the ticket is made and when the ticket is closed. We will also be creating tickets for the work that we do in the background to keep your network running smoothly. When you log in you will see all of the tickets for your account.

You will notice at the bottom of the support page tabs for documentation. We will begin to move our documentation of your site into this system as well. This process will not happen until we've moved all of our clients over to the new portal and smoothed out any initial bugs. The website is secured with a security certificate and all data transmission is encrypted. In addition, your company data is segregated in the database and cannot be seen by our other clients.

It is my hope and intention to satisfy the requests we've had for more data on what is being done and better tracking of the status of open issues. It is also my hope and intention to satisfy the requests we've had for less information and fewer confusing details. Some of our clients want to see it all and some want to see none of it. Interestingly it's about 30% show me everything and 70% please stop flooding me with information! With the portal those that want detail can log in and those that don't can just forget they have an account in the portal. Our invoice to you will now just state the total due and the detail will be in the portal for your reference at anytime. For May and June we'll keep the invoicing system unchanged but by July I expect that we'll be ready to make that final change.

Let any of us know if you have questions along the way. We've tried to make the system very simple to use.