Introduction
This document describes roles, responsibilities and communication rules between Open Xchange and Customer's departments responsible for operations and customer service.
Basics
Roles
Open-Xchange
Support
Department available 24/7/365 and first level of contact for all immediate operational topics. The primary point of contact for Customers for all functional and operational issues of OX Cloud. Escalation to further levels like Operations and Engineering will happen from there.
Other Teams – Operations, Engineering, Engineering Services
Will be engaged by the Support team if required for resolving issues reported in the tickets.
Requirements
- All issues need to be opened as a ticket within the support ticket system.
- All formal communication needs to be in English to allow 24/7 coverage.
- A central email address is required per announcement type, the distribution list will be maintained by Customer.
- A central phone number is required per announcement type if applicable.
Contact Data
Open-Xchange
Open Xchange Support will act as a central and single point of contact. All communication will be handled via our Ticket System. Further details for the ticket communication can be found in the chapter "Ticket Handling".
Customer
All non-personal communication will be sent via our distribution list. Customers can subscribe to the distribution list using multiple E-Mail addresses.
Informational announcements:
EU platform: oxcloud-de-1@open-xchange.com
US platform: oxcloud-us@open-xchange.com or oxcloud-us-2@open-xchange.com
Incident communication:
EU platform: oxcloud-de-1-incidents@open-xchange.com
US platform: oxcloud-us-incidents@open-xchange.com or oxcloud-us-2-incidents@open-xchange.com
Personal communication will be sent to the default E-Mail address defined in our Ticket System.
Announcements / Communication
Maintenance Communication
Planned maintenance will be announced three business days in advance via email including planned time and impact on the services which is to be expected.
An announcement via email will be sent when the maintenance starts and when it is finished, including the information if it was successful.
Emergency maintenance will be communicated within 4 hours of the scheduled time.
Ticket Handling
All issues experienced by the Customer will be escalated to OX via the ticket process as defined in the SLA.
Severities
| Severity 1 | Shall mean Incidents that are defined as a complete outage and do not allow the Customer to further conduct his business. The customer’s system or application is completely not available, and no workaround exists. The Incident affects all users deployed on the Joint Solution Environment and is caused by the disruption of one or more Supported Component(s). It also means a security or general threat causing potential risk to the Customers or End Users’ data integrity or privacy. |
| Severity 2 | The Customer’s operation is severely disrupted. A business-critical component of the Joint Solution Environment cannot be used by a majority of the users. |
| Severity 3 | Shall mean Incidents, which involve partial loss of non-critical functionality, one that impairs many operations, but allows the Customer to continue to operate. It also means issues happening in a test- or pre-production environment that would normally cause an adverse impact to a production network. |
| Severity 4 | Shall mean general usage questions, recommendations for product enhancements or modifications, and calls that are passed to the Parties for informational purposes. This includes but is not limited to documentation and translation errors. |
The standard way to open a ticket with OX Support is via email. For this purpose, the Customer gets a dedicated support key from Open-Xchange. When filing a ticket, the key has to be entered into the E-Mail to OX. This License Key controls the SLA in OX's ticket system.
The following article describes the information required by OX and provides a template for the email:
https://www.open-xchange.com/resources/ox-support/general-information/
Phone
Only in case of Severity 1 and Severity 2 issues, OX's Support can also be alarmed via phone after submitting a ticket:
- Germany:+49 911 34079799
- UK: +44 1942 926602
- USA: +1 408 5000766
- Japan:+81 3 45900765
Online Ticket Overview
Every Customer can track its reported tickets online as described
https://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=TicketSystemCustomerGuide
Besides this mechanism Customers can also track the ticket status in its own ticket system due to the ticket system integration.
Incident Communication
In case OX detects an outage Customer will be proactively informed and subsequent updates will be provided.
If an outage is detected by the Customer and escalated via the ticket process the same communication rules apply.
Information Outage
OX will inform Customers via email when the outage of a service is detected including the user impact and the expected Time to Restoration if already known.
As long as the outage persists OX will keep Customer up to date on the progress on an hourly basis via email if not otherwise jointly agreed during the resolution process.
OX will then also inform the Customer via email when the service is restored.
The following situations are defined as Outage:
Web-Mail / HTTP | > 30s response for a period of 15min or more |
SMTP | > 30s response for a period of 15min or more |
IMAP | > 30s response for a period of 15min or more |
POP3 | > 30s response for a period 15min or more |
Capacity Management
Capacity Management within the borders of normal organic growth is in the responsibility of Open-Xchange.
Every expected capacity requirement outside this normal growth needs to be aligned between Customer and Open-Xchange. This includes expected changes in capacity for a short term (e.g. mailings which will motivate users to use the platform to an unusual high level) as well as expected larger growth than normal (e.g. marketing campaigns driving more new users to the platform than usual).
Planned activities like that are to be discussed with Open-Xchange at least 15 business days before the event is triggered by Customer.