What support do we offer?
Our IT Services staff provide different levels of personal and training support, depending on the software you are using.
Following is a brief guide to the kind of support you can expect while you are using one of our computers at Birkbeck in central London.
- General software: This includes application software in wide use within the College (e.g. the Microsoft Office suite of applications, Exchange/Outlook email for staff, Internet Explorer, Acrobat). We aim to provide support, training and documentation on all general application software.
- If you need help with any of this software, please contact our ITS helpdesk in the first instance, as they will probably be able to resolve the issue. If they cannot, they will pass your query on to one of our IT experts, who will aim to contact you within three working days.
- Training and learning support: if no introductory documentation is supplied with the software, or if it is not considered adequate to enable you to learn the package, we will provide you with copies of our own documentation to help you.
- We may also offer training courses if there is sufficient demand from students.
- We will also investigate alternative training methods, such as videos, student guides, and computer-based and web-based training.
- Specialist software: This includes application software which is in limited use within the College - usually by one or two departments only (e.g. SPSS, Idealist, Minitab, Firefox, Visual C++, etc). Limited or no support, documentation or training is available on specialist application software. Our ITS Helpdesk staff will only deal with queries relating to installation of the software on ITS maintained equipment. Any training and documentation on the software will probably be provided by our schools and academic departments.
