We’re taking this opportunity to bring you up to speed on our preparations so that we at Excellimore can continue to support you and your staff during this difficult time.
We’ve had a busy couple of weeks as we’ve worked to help all our clients ready for working from home (WFH). We believe we’ve spoken to our key contacts at each and every organisation; if you feel you’ve been overlooked please get in touch with us directly on our usual number.
We believe we will now be moving from enabling WFH for several hundred people to supporting the inevitable issues arising as you and your colleagues start to do old things in new ways.
This gives us time now to make our own WFH arrangements. As far as we can tell on the afternoon of Friday 20th March, this will be our plan for the next few weeks.
Excellimore Availability
At Excellimore we expect to all be working from home from Tuesday 24th March for the foreseeable future.
We will continue to provide telephone and remote support for all of you as before.
We will also continue to carry out our technical Service Visits for your servers, networks, and systems, remotely from our own locations.
Our regular pattern of Technology Alignment and Planning meetings will also continue, albeit from a distance and using Microsoft Teams.
We do expect that on-site support and project work involving physical hardware will have to pause for the foreseeable future.
Contact Arrangements
If you have a new technical support issue, please consider emailing it to our helpdesk email address where our technical support team are best placed to help you.
If your issue is urgent, please call us on our usual landline number (0131-476-0000). If you do not get through to one of our team immediately please record a message; this will be emailed to our Helpdesk team who will help you accordingly.
If you are replying to a specific technician, please check their email to you. It will have their direct dial number in the footer and you might wish to use that to call them directly.
Our working hours will remain as before at 09:00am to 5:30pm Monday to Friday. One change is that we anticipate all taking lunch between 1:00pm and 2:00pm rather than staggered lunchtimes as before.
This is to help our team to re-group at 2:00pm, compare notes, and plan our afternoon’s work. The sort of thing which is habitual when we’re face-to-face in the office now needs forethought, planning, and new habits to be created.
Cyber Security for Working From Home
At Excellimore we employ the same layered security concept as we have recommended to you.
Our remote access to your systems for service and support is only available to those of our technical team who are authorised to do so. Even when authorised, they are only able to connect under certain specific conditions which include two different two-factor authentication sequences.
We trust this brief note of the arrangements gives you assurance that we take your security very seriously at this time of great change to working practices.
And finally…
Finally for now, please be aware that it’s already clear that the criminal fraternity are taking advantage of this business disruption to try to get access to information and cash.
At Excellimore we will continue to review your cyber security arrangements in the light of everyone’s new working arrangements. We expect to be in touch again shortly with recommendations for good working practices and possibly further changes to your systems.
With best wishes for continuing good health,
Your technology team at Excellimore
