Responsibilities

Service Providers

• Establish, maintain, and manage endpoint platform management tools
• Provide pathways to apply security configurations and some applications
• Establish, maintain, and manage communication channels and customer contact information for service notifications and customer support requests
• Maintain support hours during normal business hours, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• Respond to all requests submitted via ServiceNow within 3 business days
• Respond to all incidents submitted via ServiceNow within 3 business hours
• Respond to outages within 30 minutes during business hours
• Perform regular maintenance, upgrades, and security patching of the service software
• Implement service monitoring 24-7-365
• Manage service authorization and access
• Maintain internal and customer-facing service documentation
• Maintain a disaster recovery plan

Customers

Customers are ITSOs. If a unit doesn’t have an ITSO we ask them to contact EPM so that we can coordinate identification of an ITSO.
In the event the default maintenance window is not sufficient, ITSOs will create, manage, and maintain all supplementary maintenance window.

• Communicate patching expectations with the constituents within your department
• Perform regular maintenance, upgrades, and security patching of the application software
• Ensure compliance with ISO security standards
• Software deployment
• Generate reports for Inventory asset management
• Maintain current departmental contact information with the service provider
• Including notifying the Apple School Manager (ASM) management team of any staffing changes
• Adhere to published communication channels when communicating with the team

Service Availability  

The EPM production environment is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year (24-7-365), barring scheduled maintenance. 

EPM will do our best to respond to and resolve all outages within 3 hours of notification, but there is no guarantee of resolution times, particularly when outside of our defined business hours, or complexity of the issue. EPM does not offer off hours support, however, in the event of major incidents the team will provide best effort to resolve issues in a timely manner.  

The EPM service team reserves the right to alter customer access and roles if said access causes major performance or security issues for the platform or other customers. 

Non-production environments are monitored and available during normal business hours.  

Customers are responsible for notifying their end users of any service interruptions or outages that result from scheduled or unscheduled maintenance.  

Communicating with the EPM Service Team  

Service and technical support is available Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.  

• All communication with the team should start with a ServiceNow ticket. ServiceNow tickets may be directly assigned to the Assignment Group ITS-CSOL-Endpoint Management, or submitted via email to help@utexas.edu.

When you create a ticket with the service team, the team will:  

• respond to all questions submitted via ServiceNow within 8 business hours
• respond to critical platform outages within 15 minutes during normal business hours
• respond to outages outside of normal business hours to the best of the team’s abilities

Enrollment to EPM includes access to a community MS Teams channel, Endpoint Platform Management ITSOs / General. The EPM team will monitor and respond to this channel as available. All requests and issues should be routed to ServiceNow, rather than the Team channel. We do encourage the use of Teams for discussions on emerging trends, best practices, and community feedback.  

Service Requests and Technical Support  

Create a ServiceNow ticket for customer service requests or general technical support, e.g., questions about service setup, documentation, deployments, etc.  

Be prepared to share service logs with the service team upon request.  

Critical Technical Support  

For platform outages and other issues requiring immediate attention (less than 8 hours), customers may send an email message to epm-requests@its.utexas.edu with the ticket ID and follow up with a phone call to the UT Service Desk at 512-475-9400 to ensure proper escalation of the ticket. Once the EPM team has been notified of critical outages, a notice will be posted to the Teams EPM Announcement channel as well as emailed to the IT Problems list.