Services & Support 

Our team of experts is with you every step of the way, providing you with outstanding professional services & support. 

Services & Support 6

Implementation

Implementing a new software platform can be a daunting task but we are here to help. We guide you from the initial installation and configuration, through any data migrations, to your successful go-live and beyond. We have successfully implemented Elements at institutions like yours more than a hundred times before. We appreciate that every implementation is subtly different and so we aim to strike a perfect balance; using tried and true methods to give structure to your project, but with plenty of flexibility to align our services with your requirements. Every implementation starts with a kick-off call where we want to learn all about you, ensuring we have a thorough understanding of your needs and that we have a shared vision for Elements at your institution. This allows us to design (and carry out!) an implementation plan tailored to your needs. 

Services & Support 7

Support

Nearly everyone at Symplectic is involved with support. We all have areas of expertise and we believe that working directly with you makes us better at our jobs. 

We are here to support your day-to-day running of Elements and we understand that you might need help at any time of the day or night, so we promise you a local and rapid response from our highly experienced regional support managers. We have a distributed support team, and aim to have someone online 24 x 5 Monday to Friday (excluding public holidays). Following the sun, we begin each day in Melbourne (Australia), then London (UK) picks up the baton before handing it over to Philadelphia (US).

The Symplectic Support site is geared towards self-service, allowing our clients to help themselves and to find the answers the instant they need them. But if you can’t find what you need, you can live chat with our team or submit a ticket for extra assistance. 

How are we doing?

  • We keep a careful eye on the response time that we promise in our SLA (and we beat it every month).
  • We offer our clients the ability to give us feedback on every request (and we are proud of our satisfaction rating).
  • With over 10,000 page views across 2,000 sessions every month, we believe our support is premier. 
Services & Support

Custom services

We know data, and our team of experts offers a range of custom services to help you get the most out of Elements and your data. Our services include: 

Custom imports, feeds & integrations: Reusing data is at the core of good research information management so we want to help you make full use of data already available within your organisation. Using our API and importer toolkits, we will accurately map and ingest your existing data into Elements. Whether you have legacy data you wish to migrate on a one-time basis or an ongoing local source you wish to integrate to feed data on a regular basis, our team knows how to automate the process. 

Custom report templates:  Elements empowers institutions to create their own SSRS custom report templates which can then be generated directly within the Elements UI. You can write your own templates, or have our team of experts do that for you. We can develop templates with a wide range of data types and formatting options including data extracts, spreadsheets, CVs, group activity reports or formatted lists of outputs/activities. We can even add visualisations such as charts, graphs, co-authorship/collaboration diagrams and even maps. 

Repository integrations: Supporting our state-of-the-art repository integrations, we offer expert services to help you get up and running. Our team will be with you every step of the way as you connect Elements with your repository helping you map your metadata accurately, developing customised crosswalks, configuring the integration and launching the integration.

Services & Support 1

Hosting

Each hosted instance of Elements is a stand-alone system, set up for your institution. 

You retain complete control over 

  • All of your data. 
  • How the system is configured including roles and permissions. 
  • Any system integrations including usage of the API & reporting database

Our team takes care of all of the technical effort involved in upgrading Elements as well as proper maintenance of the server including security, availability and disaster recovery procedures. Your system is in safe hands as our infrastructure team has performed hundreds of migrations and upgrades. While this is traditionally a back office task, they will take the time to personally check in, and do their best to cater for your individualised requests. 

Detailed, ongoing server monitoring is a core aspect of our hosting services. Our infrastructure team actively monitors server usage and performance to ensure each instance of Elements we host is performant, well managed and has the flexibility to support changing institutional needs. 

With this partnership, we have the opportunity to position ourselves as
a world leader in the development of the scholarly ecosystem.

Keith Webster, Dean of University Libraries, Carnegie Mellon

I cannot overstate how pleased we have been.
We have to have confidence to work with a partner
for at least 5 years on a project of this size.

Caleb Smith, Senior Strategy Manager for Research Intelligence & Analytics, University of Michigan

“Faculty need only spend perhaps less than an hour a year to prepare and submit their annual reports.”

Associate Dean, Carnegie Mellon University at Qatar

"Leveraging the interoperability between Symplectic Elements and DSpace has increased policy-driven institutional repository deposits by over 350%."

Ellen Phillips, Open Access Specialist, Boston University

Elements elegantly connected our multi-university system providing a
single source of truth throughout OIEx.

Tim Cain, The Ohio Innovation Exchange (OIEx)

The University measures the individual research activity of academic staff. This Measure of Research Activity (MoRA) requires the collection of publication data from faculty. Symplectic Elements supports this beautifully.

Floris van der Leest, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia

[Elements] will help to bring transparency to the richness of thought showcased within non-traditional publications, providing a more holistic representation of faculties’ scholarly work.

Caleb Smith, University of Michigan

Feedback to date has been extremely positive from all levels across the University, with individual academics and colleagues actively promoting the ease of use of the system.

Rachel Baird, Research Policy Analyst, University of Liverpool