1. General
This Service Policy describes the Support and Maintenance Services to Licensees of the InAcademia Service, and may be updated from time to time.
2. Service hours & exceptions
The InAcademia Service is deemed operational when the application endpoints as described in the InAcademia technical manual (https://dev.inacademia.org/inacademia-implementation-guidelines/) are responding. The following exceptions apply:
- Planned maintenance windows or service interruptions (“scheduled downtimes”), which will be announced to customers via email in a timely manner. A standard maintenance window will typically require no downtime, as each node can be updated independently, and this will typically require between 0 and 4 hours, but should an outage be required, the Licensor will provide suitable notice.
- Service incidents causing outage or interruption to service.
The availability calculation excludes:
- Unavailability of any Institutional Identity Provider
- Institutional Identity Providers unable to interoperate with the InAcademia service for any reason
- Unavailability of the eduGAIN feed
- Public internet or network interruptions external to InAcademia’s datacenters
3. Support
Only Licensees of the InAcademia Service are authorised to contact the Support and Maintenance Service.
End Users are required to contact the relevant institution’s IT Department or merchant for assistance with their transaction.
If you are a Subscriber and require support for the Student Discount for WooCommerce plugin, please visit https://inacademia.org/plugin-support/ providing the required information, and refer to the service policy specified in the terms and conditions at https://inacademia.org/inacademia-api-license-agreement/.
If you are a Licensee of the InAcademia Service, you can access Support via https://inacademia.org/contact/.
All Incidents must be reported using the contact form below or via the email address for support provided at registration. Incidents reported via other methods may not receive the necessary urgency of response.
The Support and Maintenance Service is provided Monday to Friday, 08:00 – 18:00 UTC+2, with the exception of Public Holidays in Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
The Licensee is responsible for supporting its own customers and end users.
3.1 Maintenance
The Licensor shall provide maintenance updates that may include important security updates or new features and functionality. The Licensor shall notify the Licensee with appropriate notice, and it is the Licensee’s responsibility to perform regression tests in the Customer Integration Platform as provided during registration. Any issues identified during regression testing must be reported to the Licensor immediately.
3.2 Incident handling
The Licensee must report all incidents, queries and general issues as described in section 3 above. The Licensor will respond to incidents raised by the Licensee (provided that the Licensee has first established that the issue is restricted to the InAcademia Service). Reported incidents and disruptions to the agreed quality of service or functionality will be handled according to an appropriate priority based on the impact and urgency of the incident. In this context, the following priority guidelines apply:
| Priority | Description | Response Time (during Support hours) |
|---|---|---|
| Low |
Common operational issues which do slightly affect the service quality. Examples:
|
24 hours (support hours) |
| Medium |
Intermittent loss of production service: An issue that affects the service quality or partly interrupts the service usage. Examples:
|
8 hours (support hours) |
| High |
Total loss of production service: Critical issue that prevents the service usage completely or major security vulnerabilities. Examples:
|
2 hours (support hours) |
The InAcademia Support Service will not provide fixes relating to malfunctioning institutional identity providers.
3.3 Fulfilment of service requests
In addition to resolving incidents, standard service requests (e.g. information requests, documentation) may be fulfilled through the defined support channels in the same way as incidents. The support team will strive to respond to service requests within 24 hours of receipt, during support hours.
4. Reporting & escalation
4.1 Regular reporting
The following reports can be provided and are subject to specific requests to be made to the InAcademia Service support facility:
| Report title | Contents | Frequency | Delivery |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status Report |
|
Biannual | Where data is not provided publicly on the InAcademia website it can be delivered to customers via email |
| Service Report |
Current performance according to service targets
|
Quarterly | Delivered to customers via email |
4.2 Escalation & complaints
For escalation and complaints, the defined service provider contact point shall be used, according to the following escalation path using contact details provided during the registration process:
| Level | Contact | Response Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | InAcademia Business Development Manager | 48 hours |
| 2 | InAcademia Service Owner | 72 hours |
5. Registration
As part of the registration process for InAcademia (see https://dev.inacademia.org/registering-your-service/), the Licensee is required to validate some technical configuration attributes and to provide the following data via the registration form provided. Completing the registration process, including the supply of administrative and technical data, and completing the https, redirectURL and DNS validation processes is mandatory.
To secure communications between the InAcademia service and the clients, the use of a valid https certificate for the RedirectURL is mandatory. The use of self-signed certificates is not allowed and may result in termination of the service. The InAcademia support team will notify you when the validation of your registration has succeeded and the connection is active.
Updated September 2024