Last update: 23rd November 2021
We have contingency plans in place to deal with the effects of the COVID-19 coronavirus. Here is our current advice to customers. We have adopted a mix of office-based and hybrid home/office working, which is now our norm.
We are grateful not to have suffered much staff absence due to illness, but like many organisations we are facing a competitive environment with recruitment. Please be considerate to our hard-working staff!
Training Delegates
We are running remotely-delivered courses. Our Exeter classrooms are closed until further notice.
We are now offering courses that are run on an ‘attend from anywhere’ basis. These are scheduled courses with live trainers allowing questions and feedback. Please contact us with your requirements for technical and business skills training. We’ll work to match you up with a provider with a remote delivery mechanism. You can also search our online catalogue.
EXAMS
Sorry, we are no longer hosting examinations in our training centre.
Nexus Seminars
All seminars are now run as webinars or bitesize videos.
Check our events page and news pages for latest listings of free educational content, covering Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Teams, telephony/communications, SharePoint and more.
IT Projects
Now, our projects team are mostly remote-working, but otherwise operating normally.
We are busy with client work. We will conduct as much project work as possible on a remote basis but site work will be undertaken according to demand. Project meetings can be conducted using phone conferencing or video conferencing; site visits will be considered case-by-case.
For site visits, we have a safety policy for our staff and will comply with all your own reasonable safety policies.
IT Support Services
Today, the Nexus support operation is fully-resourced.
Our helpdesk daily ticket count is at elevated levels. Our staff are variously based in the office ands remotely. It’s still easy to get in touch, our usual phone numbers and email addresses will work as normal. Support services will be delivered in full. (See how below.)
Account review meetings are likely to be conducted using phone conferencing or video conferencing.
IT Equipment Supply
Today, our procurement supply chain is operating, but with some shortages.
Laptops, monitors and headsets are in short supply. We have good relationships with the wholesale distributors we use, so contact us for availability information on goods.
Stock is selling before it reaches our shores, so be prepared to order ahead on some lines.
RESPONSE AND policy statementS for our customers
- The management exec team and the HR officer track the latest COVID-19 information, agree procedures, and implement them. We have a specific COVID-19 management plan and a COVID-19 extended homeworking plan, which receive regular updates.
- The risk of staff illness and contagion is mitigated by increased hygiene whilst in the office (and through isolation when we’re not), a flexible team, and our live overview of our prioritised workload.
- We had already mitigated our dependence on attending the office by using primarily cloud-based systems. We have completed and implemented a plan which allows up to 100% of our staff to work remotely from the office. We have now settled on a mix of office-based and hybrid home/office working, which we can flex if variations in health risks. We have business continuity across our operations from sales to service delivery to accounting.
- Our office-based systems are connected to the outside via multiple independent internet connections.
- All our usual contact methods apply seamlessly to remote workers. We can host internal and client web conferences using Microsoft Teams.
- The isolating effects of remote working are mitigated through text, voice and video communication through Microsoft Teams, and file collaboration with SharePoint.
- When remote working, for security we use single sign-on with two-factor authentication for the majority of our cloud applications. We use device management systems which mandate minimum security requirements for signed-in computers, such as encrypted operating system drives. We use further profiling, filtering and tracking tools to proactively mitigate various cyber-security risks.
- If person-to-person contact is restricted by government disease control policy, site visits to clients may be stopped or require special measures. In this case, on-site support and on-site project is subject to certain limits beyond our control.
- If the spread of the virus is too fast, there may be a period when a significant part of our workforce is ill simultaneously. When our staff do attend our office during times of higher risk, we use bubble separation to minimise the chances of a whole team/department becoming ill at the same time.
- Our ticketing system gives each support request a priority, and so our resources will be directed to the most critical tickets first. Multiple subject-expert staff would have to be ill simultaneously in order to seriously limit our capability to resolve a specialised support ticket. We hope this situation doesn’t arise, but would consider it a force majeure event.
If you have further specific questions, please ask your account manager.
