Welcome [contact_company_name] !
1. What is Preferred Care?
2. What we do to bring your system online.
3. What we do afterwards.
4. Email Spam filtering.
5. Contacting Support.
1. What is Preferred Care?
Preferred Care is our signature series managed services maintenance package. In this plan we monitor computers, servers, networks and more for updates and patches, system functions, perform daily/weekly maintenance and proactively correct issues if possible as they happen.
Computer problems sometimes just are unavoidable yet some of the solutions are always the same fix. With our monitoring system, we try to automate many of this fixes which allows your problems to be resolved quickly, sometimes without even knowing it actually happened!
How many times have you sat and waited for disk defragment to finish or cleaning all those temp files? For those of you that answered forever, no worries as we do that for you. For those of you that answered what?.. No worries either as after a few runs of our maintenance system, you will notice that your computer will actually run more like when you first plugged it in.
For those of you that ran around to machine after machine to do those Windows Updates, take a breather and use that time for something else now as we do that too!
Depending upon which Preferred Care package your company purchased, your support options may vary but rest assured your maintenance and monitoring of your system will remain the same.
Should you ever have any questions or comments, please feel free to send us an email to preferredcare@preferreditgroup.com or give us a call at 866-369-1970 or 260-213-4266.
2. What we do to bring your system online.
If we haven’t done so already, we will be installing a system agent that will show up in the lower right hand corner by your clock. This will have an icon of “VT” which will change colors depending upon the condition. This agent collects information about your computer stats and reports back to our monitoring server. We do not monitor keystrokes, typed passwords or any items that might be of “privacy related”. We do collect information such as network data usage which includes surfing habits, application usage, ect. This information is collected and reported to the companies owners and or designated managers. Should you have concerns about information collected please contact us or see your supervisor/manager.
After this agent is installed we begin our monitoring procedure which performs an audit of your system, checks for drive space and drive errors, and where your machine stands for patching. We then schedule a time to force patch your system to a current level. Should you know of a particular patch that might affect a particular application, please contact us immediately so we can take preventative measures. With our patching system, we can actually control the release of patches where-as windows updates dumps any and all patches to your machine, which sometimes can create problems.
We also implement certain group policy changes locking down parts of your workstations. The number one method for infecting a machine is to allow a program to install. This occurs typically when opening an infected file, document or just simply going to the wrong website. While we place many protective procedures in place, allowing a workstation to run with administrative privileges is just plain bad practice. Occasionally this might cause an older “legacy” program to fail. In this situation, please let us know about the failure and we’ll work to resolve this issue quickly. If you know of an legacy application that your company uses that has issues with security, please let us know. While some might think we are playing big-brother, it is strictly our job to keep your computers working efficiently and these procedures are part of our requirements to accomplish this task.
We also (for most plans) will set your system up with antispam filtering. This filtering can take up to a week to install however you will see the effects from the initial install. A separate email will be sent to your inbox with information about this service.
3. What we do afterwards
Our system constantly monitors your network 24 x 7 performing audits, error checking and proactively performing maintenance functions to your equipment. For this to happen, first we must ask that you leave your machines on 24 x 7 as we can not perform any of these functions without them on. Machines that inadvertently get turned off will actually cause an alarm to show on our monitoring system.
We may also reboot your machine after certain functions are ran on your machine so you need to make sure that all applications are closed before leaving for the day. You may either lock or logout of your system if you are concerned about security which we strongly suggest anyway.
Some of the functions we perform are: Defragging the hard drives, removal of temporary files, drive cleaning, drive analyzing, registry backups, plus more.
You may turn off your monitor (suggested) when leaving for the day.
4. Spam Filtering
Postini Spam Filtering is included in most Preferred Care packages. To install this service, we reroute your company's email to Postini’s data center where it’s filtered and then relayed to your company's email server. In the event of your server going offline, Postini’s system will automatically hold all inbound email until your server is available. Postini will hold up to 1 gigabyte of email while your server is offline, so rest assured your protected.
Nightly a email will be sent to your inbox showing a list of emails that have been quarantined. You can simply take a look at this list and release any that you may want to see or you can delete the email. Quarantined emails are automatically purged after 30 days so there is no need to do anything else. You also have the option to login to your Postini Portal where you can change settings, white and blacklist email addresses and domains and look at your quarantined emails.
We will send you a separate email that contains more information along with a user manual for the Postini Spam Filtering system. If you should loose this manual, you can always find it is our support section of our website. www.preferreditgroup.com
5. Contacting Support
The following methods are available for submitting a support request:
A. Email support@preferreditgroup.com
B. Login to our support portal by either double clicking the VT icon or right clicking and then clicking on Support.
C. You can also directly login to http://connect.preferreditgroup.com
If you do not have a login, ask any staff member to get you setup.
D. Go to our website http://www.preferreditgroup.com/support
E. Call us directly at 866-369-1970 or 260-213-4266, OPT 1 for Service
Please do not leave support requests directly on a staff members extension. Doing so may result in delays in getting your request handled.
Our company uses a CRM system which handles all of our service requests, invoicing and knowledge base lookups. This state of the art system is also tied into our monitoring system. Service requests are entered into this system either by our monitoring system, a staff member or directly by you or one of your staff members. We designate a member of your staff as a direct point of contact. This member will always receive emails of any submitted cases along with status updates. If a staff member other than the designated member submits a case, the submitter will also receive an email with the case information.
Our goal is to keep constant communication with you until the issue is resolved.
Replying to any of these emails will add notes to the case automatically.
It is the policy of Preferred IT Group, LLC to not give out cell phone numbers or home telephone numbers. Please do not request these as our employee’s are not allowed to give these out. Our phone and CRM systems are tied into our cell phones and keep our staff members constantly updated.
We appreciate your business and welcome you to our Preferred Care Family. Should you ever have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. We also produce a newsletter with tips and tricks. If you have something that would benefit others, we would appreciate you sending that to us.
We are also constantly updating our website with information, so please take a look when you have a chance.
Sincerely,
Preferred IT Group, LLC