Planned Service Desk & Ticketing Platform Upgrade

As part of our continued commitment to delivering a high-quality, consistent service experience, we’re pleased to confirm the upcoming transition of the Academia Autotask helpdesk ticket platform into our dedicated IT Services division – Smartdesc – on the weekend of 11^th/12^th July.

From Monday 13^th July 2026, your services will be supported through the Smartdesc Autotask platform, bringing together our teams, tools and expertise from across Academia into a single, unified service delivery model.

This transition is focused on bringing our teams and toolsets together, enabling a more joined-up approach to service delivery.

Because Academia already uses Autotask, the change should have minimal impact on your staff. Behind the scenes, we are consolidating the separate Academia and Smartdesc Autotask instances into a single Smartdesc platform, which will:

• Align teams more closely, giving you access to a broader pool of expertise.
• Standardise service delivery practices, ensuring a consistent experience across all interactions.
• Enhance collaboration internally, enabling faster and more effective resolution of requests.
• Provide a unified platform for managing incidents, requests and projects.
• Improve visibility and communication, with clearer updates and tracking of work in progress.
• Enable future enhancements and scalability as your requirements evolve.

This is not just a system change, it’s a step forward in how we work together to support your organisation.

Our priority is to ensure that this transition is as seamless and low impact for your users as possible.

• Your existing support channels (email and phone) will remain unchanged.
• All open tickets and relevant history will be available within the Smartdesc platform.
• Ticket numbers will be different, but we can reference the original number.
• You will continue to work with familiar team members, now supported by a wider Smartdesc capability.

Bringing teams together within a single platform allows us to:

• Respond more quickly to requests.
• Share knowledge more effectively.
• Reduce hand-offs and delays.

You will have clearer insight into:

• Ticket progress and status.
• Ongoing work and updates.
• Communication with our service teams.

This change enables a more collaborative approach between your teams and ours, ensuring:

• Faster resolution times.
• More proactive communication.
• A more joined-up support experience.

You will continue to have access to self-service capabilities via the Smartdesc platform, including:

• Logging incidents and requests.
• Viewing ticket status and history.
• Communicating directly with our engineers.
• Attaching files and supporting information.

We will share guidance and support materials to help your users make the most of these features.

We recognise that changes like this need to be carefully managed and we have a structured plan in place to ensure a smooth experience:

• All open tickets and relevant data will be transitioned into the Smartdesc platform.
• There will be no interruption to service during the migration.
• Though not all ticket data will be available in the Smartdesc platform until the migration is complete.
• Our support services will remain fully operational throughout.
• Phone Support unaffected.
• New tickets via email unaffected.
• For all open tickets, the contact will receive an update with the new ticket details once the migration is complete.
• It is important that only this email be used for all future email communications on existing requests.
• Additional guidance and support will be available for your users where required.
• The Control:IT platform available at https://portal.academia.co.uk will be available for existing users before the migration process completes.
• Customers using the Autotask Portal will receive new invites to setup access.

This consolidation creates a strong foundation for continuous improvement. By working within a single platform and team structure, we are better positioned to:

• Introduce new capabilities and enhancements.
• Improve reporting and insights.
• Deliver a more consistent, high-quality service over time.