ITS Help Desk After Hours Emergency Service
The Help Desk provides a 24 x 7 on-call support service during the hours that the Help Desk telephone service is not available (click here for regular Help Desk telephone support hours). There are two main areas of support that are provided with the After Hours Emergency Service:
- Large scale service interruptions for ITS-provided services that affect multiple people. For example, widespread problems with Hawkmail or Active Directory that are impacting many people.
- Problems that are affecting critical University-related business. These types of problems may affect only a single individual, but the work that they are doing may be deemed critical to the University and therefore support would be provided.
Note: This service is designed for wide-scale outages and University-critical business. Though all customer issues are important to ITS and the Help Desk strives to resolve all of them in a timely manner, only emergency situations as defined above can be addressed by the Help Desk After Hours Emergency Service. The Help Desk on-call individual will use their best judgment in determining if the issue is an emergency.
Routine calls that come in during after-hours support will be handled during the next business hours. Some examples of routine calls are:
- A single individual who is unable to access an ITS-provided service, but the service is available to all other customers.
- A single individual who is having problems with his or her computer that does not involve critical University-related business.
- A HawkID password reset that does not involve critical University-related business.
Help Desk After Hours Emergency Service Process
The following describes the process for how the Help Desk After Hours Emergency Service works:
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A customer calls the 319-384-HELP number after hours and selects the appropriate option (i.e. 1 for faculty/staff or 2 for student).
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The customer receives a recorded message similar to the following:
You have reached the ITS Help Desk. Our office is closed at this time. After hours service is available for emergencies only. Emergencies are defined as wide-scale outages affecting many people or problems that are affecting critical University-related business. If you feel that your problem constitutes an emergency as previously defined, please press 0 to have someone paged. If your problem is not an emergency, please leave a detailed message, including your name, phone number and a detailed description of your problem, and we will return your call during our next business hours.
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If the customer presses 0, they will be taken to a voice mail box with a message similar to the following:
You have reached the ITS Help Desk After Hours Emergency line. If you have a computer emergency, leave a voicemail message and the on-call attendant will be paged at home and will return your message within 15 minutes.
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Once the customer has left a message, the Help Desk on-call agent will be notified and they will listen to the message. If the issue is determined to be an emergency, the Help Desk agent will contact the customer to begin working on a resolution. If the issue is determined not to be an emergency, the customer will be contacted and informed that their issue will be referred to the Help Desk to handle during the next regular business hours.