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. 

Support

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. 
custom services

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.

hosting

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. 

We wanted to create a single, multi-university resource that provides
enhanced visibility into expertise, equipment and research
support services and available IP.

Tim Cain, Ohio Innovation Exchange

This tool connects our scholarly and research expertise with audiences like media,
prospective graduate students, and academic collaborators, while simultaneously
helping faculty keep track of the very important work they do. It is a game-changer for U of T.

Associate Vice-President Research, University of Toronto

The deeply integrated environment we now have will greatly enhance
our ability to manage the range of repository activities and strengthen
our position in preparing for any future research assessment exercises.

Digital Development Manager, University of Sussex

It helps keep us organised and keeps everything in one place.

Peter Fisher, Worldwide Cancer Research

Researcher profiles and end-to-end funded research
project management all now take place in the one interface,
which has huge benefits to our researchers.

Liam Cleere, University College Dublin

The discovery module has provided a delightful and fantastic
searchable public interface to our to our faculty.

Paul Bergen, Tufts University

The rate of deposit has increased by 1000% within 12 months following the switch-on of
the publication prompt in Elements and discussion about the HEFCE Open Access policy.

Queen Mary University of London

Elements impressed us with its simplicity, flexibility and control
for individual faculty members, and great responsiveness with customer service.

Clarke Iakovakis, Oklahoma State University

I think the most important feature Symplectic Elements came with was interoperability
The fact that it had that flow through profiles to the repository was really, really valuable for us.

Research Advisor, La Trobe University

Working with Symplectic Grant Tracker has streamlined our grants application process,
with automation of various processes being key to saving us time.

Research & Grants Manager, Bowel Research UK