Help desk 8x5 for your end users.
The SUMāTO support centre is organised in two fronts, each with its own hours, entry route and response times. Knowing which one your case belongs to is what gets it through the right door from the first contact.
24x7 · every day of the year
What carries the operation and keeps no office hours: servers and virtualisation, network and connectivity, public and private cloud, backup and recovery, perimeter and security, and the platform services the business runs on.
8x5 · business days, business hours
Support for the people who use the systems: Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, mail and collaboration, devices and peripherals, access and passwords, printing, and the applications of daily work.
If you are not sure which of the two is yours, describe it and we classify it. A case that comes in as end user and turns out to be infrastructure changes lane without you having to tell it twice.
The same channels serve both services. What changes is the hours in which they answer and the route that suits what is at stake.
Open for both services. Leaves a written record and opens the case with its number.
Phone
Provided with your contract
The fastest route for an outage in progress: someone answers on the spot and classifies the severity with you on the same call. Infrastructure, 24x7.
Client portal
Provided with your contract
Open a case, follow the ones you already have and check your history, at any hour and without writing an email.
Infrastructure 24x7
Write to the support mailbox and say in the first contact that the operation is down: that is the fact which sets the severity the case enters with.
Help desk 8x5
Email or portal during business hours, with the name of the affected user and what they see on screen. If looking at the device helps, a remote assistance session is arranged inside the same case.
Response time is how long we take to pick the case up and put a person on it; resolution time is measured separately. Each service has its own scale, because an infrastructure outage and an end-user question are not measured with the same yardstick.
| Severity | When it applies | Channel |
|---|---|---|
| Severity 1 | The service is down or data is being lost. There is no way to keep operating, not even in a degraded form. | |
| Severity 2 | The service runs degraded or a critical function is unavailable. There is a way to carry on, at a cost or at a risk. | |
| Severity 3 | An isolated fault with no effect on the operation, a configuration question or a change request that can be scheduled. |
| Priority | When it applies | Channel |
|---|---|---|
| High | A team or a whole area unable to work: mail down for the group, access lost to the tool that issues invoices, a meeting room out of service before a board session. | |
| Medium | One person blocked in their work, or a group with a limited function: an account that will not sign in, a shared file that will not open, a printer that does not respond. | |
| Low | Requests that can be scheduled and how-to questions: onboarding a new user, a permission, installing an application, how to do something in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. |
The scale is set by the effect on your operation, not by the component that fails. A secondary service can be severity 1 if it stops the day's invoicing, and a central one can be severity 3 if it has redundancy and nobody notices. If your case fits no row, say so and we classify it together.
The help desk counts in business hours. A case that arrives at five on a Friday afternoon runs from Monday morning. What cannot wait until Monday belongs to infrastructure and enters through the 24x7 route.
When seeing your screen settles a case faster than describing it, we use Quick Assist, the tool already built into Windows. We install nothing of ours on your machine, the connection only starts once you type the code we read out to you, and you authorise each step separately.
It is a Windows toolIf the affected machine runs another operating system, tell us when you open the case and we agree on a different route in.
You need no Microsoft accountOnly the engineer helping you signs in. You neither authenticate nor install anything.
If you cannot find the appIt installs free from the Microsoft Store, searching for "Quick Assist". On Windows 10 it also adds the WebView2 component the first time.
Internet access is requiredThe session travels encrypted over HTTPS, port 443. On a corporate network with restricted egress, your IT team may need to permit it.
Windows prompts are yours to acceptIf a User Account Control confirmation appears, you have to press it from your own machine: we cannot.
We work with your permissionsDuring the session the engineer can do what your user can do on that machine, no more and no less.
Never accept a remote connection you did not ask for. A Quick Assist code opens your machine to someone else, and asking for one out of the blue is exactly how fake tech-support scams work. We will only ask you for a code inside a case you opened, and through the support channels shown on this page. If someone calls you unprompted claiming to be SUMāTO, hang up and call us yourself.
What people ask before opening a case. If your question is not here, open the case anyway and we will sort it out on the way: we would rather take one case too many than have an operation sitting still while someone makes sure.
The effect decides it, not the product. If what is affected is a system the whole operation depends on — the server, the network, the cloud, the backup, the perimeter — it is infrastructure, and that route is open 24x7.
If what is affected is the work of one person or one team — an account, a computer, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, a printer, a permission — it is the help desk, during business hours. If you are unsure, describe it: we classify it and the case does not have to be told twice.
An incident is something that stopped working the way it had been working. A change request is something you want to work differently: a new setting, a permission, a report that did not exist before.
Both come in through the same channels, but only an incident runs against the times in the severity table; a change is scheduled. If you are not sure, describe it and we will classify it.
It is set by the effect on your operation, not by the component that failed. A secondary service being down can be severity 1 if it stops the day's invoicing, and a central one can be severity 3 if it has redundancy and nobody notices.
The severity table on this page carries the definition of each level. If your case fits no row, say so and we decide it together.
No, and it is worth saying plainly. The response time is how long we take to pick the case up and put a person on it. Time to a fix depends on the fault: an unknown root cause can take hours of diagnosis with the case attended from the first minute.
Six things, and with them the case moves without a second round of questions:
The case is logged with its number, the time it was opened and its severity, and you are told who is handling it and where the updates will reach you.
Severity 1 and 2 are accompanied through to restoration, not to diagnosis. On closing we report the cause, what was done, and what stops it happening again.
When seeing your screen settles the case faster than describing it — an error that only shows on one machine, a setting someone has to look at, behaviour that is hard to put into words.
We use Quick Assist, already built into Windows, and you authorise each step. The step-by-step is at the bottom of this page.
It is logged on arrival and its response time runs from the next business morning. The help desk measures in business hours, and saying so plainly avoids the wrong expectation on a Sunday afternoon.
What cannot wait until the next morning is almost always infrastructure — mail for the whole company, the network at a site, the system that issues invoices — and that route is open every day of the year.
This line serves active contracts. If you need help with a running operation and do not have one yet, write to us through the commercial channel and we will tell you honestly whether we can help and how soon: talk to the commercial team.
Before you need it
This page serves active contracts. If you have an operation running and want it under cover, let us talk: infrastructure 24x7, help desk 8x5, or both. We will tell you plainly what we cover, in which hours, and how soon we can start.
