Tuesday 31st August 2010
Tuesday 31st August 2010
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:: out of the blue :: |
In This Issue
We've had a busy start to the new financial year with several projects either completed or being worked on - we hope you are also keeping busy and getting plenty of business. In this issue of Out of the Blue we have a couple of announcements, firstly a change to our office opening hours and secondly a sad farewell to Dan Webb. We wish him all the very best for his overseas adventure.
This year we have decided to support a very worthy cause - Blue September - a campaign to raise both awareness of men's cancers and funds to support the Australian Cancer Research Foundation and Bowel Cancer Australia. We hope you will join us in supporting this important annual event.
We have also put our "Go Green with Blueprint" catchphrase into practice by recycling our obsolete computer equipment through the friendly people at Buyequip. They have kindly submitted an article for this edition explaining their services and how they can help make your office clean up an environmentally responsible task.
Finally we have included simple instructions on how to log jobs in our new Managed Services Portal. We hope you find the new system quick and easy to use.
Best Regards
Ron Llewellyn
Manager Director
Blueprint Technologies Australia
Change of Office Hours and After Hours
Support
We have recently reviewed our office opening hours and have decided to make a small change. Our current advertised opening hours are 8:30am to 5:30pm. We have found however that most of our clients start early with the majority closing by 5:00pm. We have therefore decided that as from 1st September 2010 our office closing time will change to 5:00pm. We hope that this will help to provide our staff with a more balanced work/home life.
How will this affect you?
We don't anticipate that this will cause any major problems to our clients as we will still be available for after hours work where required. The main change will be that any calls made to our office after 5:00pm (and before 8:30am) will be answered by our after hours messaging system. The after hours message system is monitored and urgent or emergency jobs attended to as soon as we are able. To assist with making it easier to contact us after hours in the case of emergencies we now have a dedicated mobile phone number. Please make a note of the following number for emergency, after hours use:
Blueprint Technologies After Hours Emergencies - 0438 763 547
After two and a half years with Blueprint, we are sad to announce that Dan is leaving us for an overseas adventure. We will be very sorry to see him go but wish him all the very best and hope he has an exciting time exploring the UK and parts of Europe. His last official day with us will be Tuesday 31st August and he flies off to London on 22nd September. We will be holding farewell drinks on Friday 17th September - if you would like to join us for this event please email anya@bta.com.au and we'll send you through the details once we have finalised them.
Blueprint Supports "Blue September"
Some of you may know that in the
past Blueprint have supported the annual Cancer Council's "Girls Night In"
campaign. This year we have decided to get behind the Australian Cancer
Research Foundation and Bowel Cancer Australia's "Blue September" campaign.
This campaign aims to raise awareness about cancer in men and to raise much
needed funds to support the two foundations. Blueprint Technologies have
registered as a company fundraiser and we will be holding various events
throughout the month to try and reach our goal of $1,000 in donations.
Dan has kindly agreed to combine his farewell drinks night with our main event - so keep Friday 17th September free and stay tuned for more information. We have set up a webpage where online donations can be made and our progress tracked. We hope you will join us in supporting this very worthy cause.
We recently had a clean out of the Blueprint office and found a lot of obsolete IT and electronic equipment sitting around taking up space and not able to be used anymore. We didn't want to just throw it all in the bin and have it end up in land fill so we did some research and found a local computer remarketer and recycler. The friendly staff at Buyequip Pty Ltd were more than happy to help us out. For a small fee they came and picked up our old computers, servers and boxes of IT bits and pieces and are now in the process of either refurbishing them for resale or separating it all into basic parts for recycling. We were very happy with their service and have therefore asked them to submit an article about their services:
Buyequip provide environmental solutions for End of Use (EOU) and End of Life (EOL) IT equipment and electronic assets. Through reuse and recycling channels, Buyequip ensures best practice is followed for the protection of the environment.
Buyequip’s eWaste services are undertaken on behalf of clients to ensure the utmost care and attention is achieved to accord to sustainability requirements or to obtain financial returns. Buyequips services include IT Resale and Remarketing, eWaste Recycling, Collections and Drop Offs, Data Destruction and Asset Management.
The term EOU typically refers to electronic items that have completed their first useful life cycle and are typically removed from a commercial culture. Often IT equipment including desktops, monitors, notebooks, communications infrastructure and servers is at the end of its warranty period but still holds value on the second-hand user market. In this instance, Buyequip test and then remarket the items to the most viable buyer, and forward a financial return to the client.
EOL refers to electronic items that are now redundant and at the end of their usefulness. These items need to be recycled. Items that are deemed EOL are broken down into the various parts – plastic, metals, glass, circuit board etc and these parts are then sold for remanufacture into new products, or sent to other specialised recyclers for further processing and precious metal recovery. All Buyequip’s recycling processes are in accordance with national environmental standards and Buyequip provide the necessary certification to validate this claim.
With approximately 1.6 million computers dumped in Australia each year, the need to reduce the presence of eWaste in landfill is imperative for a sustainable environment.
Buyequip congratulates Blueprint Technologies for being environmentally responsible with their IT equipment with Buyequip and encourages all businesses to do the same. For more information contact Buyequip on 1300 289 727.
Managed Services Portal - Logging Tickets Instructions
As advised in our previous Out of the Blue newsletter, we are now using our Managed Services Portal to log and track all incoming jobs. We’ve had several enquiries regarding the process for clients logging their own jobs into the system – thanks for your interest. The process is quite simple and is basically a matter of logging in, entering the details and clicking on submit. The MSP will automatically email our support mailbox to advise us of the job. The support mailbox is monitored throughout the day and, depending on the severity/urgency, jobs are attended to as soon as an engineer becomes available.
If your computer already has
the MSP agent installed you should have a small blue BTA icon on your start menu
that looks like this:
Right click on the icon and choose Log Support Request. This will bring up Blueprint's Managed Services Portal.
From the Function List menu on the left hand side of the screen under Trouble Tickets click on "Create New Ticket"
You should have the following screen come up:
The Ticket ID is your job number - this will be automatically generated once you submit the job. The ticket will also automatically associate itself with the machine you are working on.
In the Summary field, in just a few words, enter a short description of your problem or request.
Enter your contact details in the Submitter Information section i.e. Name, Email Address and Phone number.
Choose a job Category from the drop down list (if unsure choose “Helpdesk: Misc”). Note: the Assignee, Status and Priority will be entered by Blueprint staff once we have assessed the job.
In the text box under Enter new note type in more detailed information about the job. This may include how many people are affected; how long you have been experiencing the problem; any troubleshooting you may have already attempted; any special instructions regarding contact details; or date the job is required by.
You may also include files or screenshots of the problem by clicking on Browse, navigating to the file on your computer, highlight the file and click on Open. This will insert a hyperlink to the file for our engineers to review.
Once you are happy with the information supplied simply click on the Submit button and we will take care of the rest!
Our team are happy to assist with any enquiries you might have.
| Phone | (07) 3852 1250 |
| Freecall (QLD Callers) | 1800 064 906 |
| After Hours Emergencies | 0438 763 547 |
| Fax | (07) 3852 1194 |
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IT Support Sales Accounts |
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| Online Shop | http://shop.bta.com.au |
| Website | http://www.bta.com.au/ |
| Managed Services Portal | http://maintenance.bta.com.au |
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