We hope that you and your loved ones are keeping safe and well. We wanted to provide an update on some of the steps we’ve taken in recent weeks to adapt to the new normal as well as gather customer opinions on what else they need from us during this time.
Supporting social distancing
Like the rest of the world, we’re doing what we can to support social distancing, and we’ve made various changes to support customers and staff to work remotely.
We’ve created various resources and run customer webinars on effectively working remotely with their systems. We’re converting the content that was due to take place at our upcoming user conferences into online sessions for customers worldwide, along with adapting planned and upcoming software training to digital delivery.
All of our staff are adhering to national guidelines meaning that our staff in countries that are locked down are working remotely and staying connected through digital channels.
Increasing online access to knowledge and collections
We’ve been working hard to support customers stay engaged with audiences digitally and provide access to resources. We provided free access to e-books for schoolchildren in Sweden to support them maintaining their education, and we’ve been working hard to integrate chat technology into various web publishing tools to allow organisations to serve customer enquiries quickly and efficiently.
We have been adapting our roadmaps and deliveries as much as possible, to ensure that we deliver solutions that will enable you to input data as well as repackaging existing solutions to support certain scenarios, for example sharing digital assets from the collection to a wider audience within the institution.
Ensuring delivery and access to support
We’ve worked hard to ensure that all of our staff have access to everything they need to continue to provide customer support and deliver projects remotely. Our support hours remain unchanged, and we’re still aiming to deliver to our promised project delivery timescales wherever the customer is able. Our internal infrastructure was validated early during the outbreak to be able to support our operations and those adjustments remain in force. Since our last update, we have also made additional changes to ensure that all our customers can get help in leveraging our knowledge if support is needed to ensure the capability to work remotely.
We are also trying to prioritise any support, upgrades or deployments which enable customers to adapt to the current situation.
Staying positive, staying connected
As we all adapt to being physically disconnected, we’re trying to play our part in ensuring that we’re regularly communicating and staying in touch. We’ve increased our outbound customer communication through email, and we’re striving to ensure that we’re getting information out in a timely manner.
We’ve also worked to facilitate customer to customer communication, by launching a community discussion group for our CMS users so museums and archives from around the world can share ideas and support each other.
Internally that means that besides making sure we’re speaking regularly about what we need to achieve for customers – we’re holding digital hangouts and fun activities for our teams so our colleagues can connect socially.
Survey for CMS users
We understand now, that in most countries at least some form of social distancing will continue for the foreseeable future and we want to make sure that we’re doing enough to support our customers during this time.
We’ve put together a short survey for our CMS users, and we’d be grateful if you could fill it in to help us get an understanding of what you need from us now and for the next few months.
We hope that you and your families stay safe and well, persevere through any lockdowns that are taking place and are able to find ways to interact. We look forward to seeing you soon, digitally or in person when the world opens up again!