Your first week, in five moves
Get these done and the rest of your setup tends to take care of itself. If any of them stalls, that's a ticket — not a personal failing.
- Sign in to your work account and change the starter password. If you were given a temporary password, replace it with something only you know.
- Set up multi-factor authentication on your phone. This is the single biggest thing standing between your account and someone else. Most organizations use {{mfaAppName}} — install it, then follow Microsoft's setup walkthrough. If you get stuck at any point, that's a ticket, not a puzzle you have to solve alone. Get it for iPhone Get it for Android On paper: search your phone's App Store or Google Play for "{{mfaAppName}}", published by Microsoft.
- Save our contact details in your phone. {{portalUrl}} and {{supportPhone}}. You will want them on a day when your computer is the thing that isn't working.
- Find the {{phishButtonName}} button in Outlook. See Staying safe. Knowing where it is before you need it makes a real difference.
- Ask about anything you're missing. Access to a folder, a program everyone else seems to have, a second monitor. Start with your manager for access, us for anything broken.
{{msp}}
Your computer, email, network, printers, security, and the day-to-day "why isn't this working." We're an outside company, but treat us like the IT department down the hall.
Your manager or internal contact
Approves what you're allowed to access, what software gets bought, and who gets an account. They're the gate; we're the hands.
Your specialist software vendor
Some industry-specific programs are supported directly by the company that makes them. We'll tell you plainly when something belongs to them, and help you get there.
We would much rather hear from you early.
A five-minute question on Tuesday is easier for everyone than a lost afternoon on Friday. Nobody here keeps score of how many tickets you file, and no question in this document's subject area is one we'll think less of you for asking.
Four ways to reach us, best first
The portal and the icon on your computer are the two we'd rather you used — both open a ticket with the details already attached. Email works fine. The phone is for emergencies, and we mean that literally.
The {{portalLabel}}
{{portalUrl}}Use this for: anything that isn't an emergency. It asks you the questions we'd otherwise have to email you about, and it lets you see everything you've reported, add information later, and check where things stand without asking anyone. The QR code at the top of this page puts it on your phone.
The ROI icon on your computer
Where to find it: down by the clock, bottom-right on Windows. You may need to click the small arrow to show hidden icons. Click it and you can send us a request without leaving what you're doing — and it tells us which computer you're on automatically, which saves a round trip.
Email us
{{supportEmail}}Use this for: the same things as the portal, if that's simply what you'd rather do. It creates a ticket automatically. One issue per email, please — separate problems in one thread get tangled and one of them always gets lost.
Call us
{{supportPhone}}Reserved for: a suspected security problem happening right now; someone who needs their access shut off immediately; a whole team or site unable to work; or a situation where you genuinely cannot reach us any other way, because the computer you'd use to do it is the thing that's broken.
Please don't call for routine requests. The phone jumps a technician out of whatever they're concentrating on, so keeping it clear for real emergencies is what makes it work when there is one.
Normal hours
{{hours}}
Outside those hours
{{afterHoursLine}}
"First response" means a person gets back to you — not that the problem is solved. Sometimes those are the same moment. Often the fix needs a conversation first.
- Your request becomes a ticket and lands on our board within a minute or two, whichever way you sent it. You'll usually get an automatic acknowledgement.
- A technician picks it up and reads it. This is where a well-written ticket saves you a day.
- We either fix it or ask you something. If we need to get onto your computer, we'll ask first and you'll see it happen.
- We tell you it's done and why it happened, if the "why" is useful to you.
- If it wasn't actually fixed, say so. Replying to the closure note reopens the ticket. That's not a complaint; it's the system working.
How to describe a problem so it gets fixed the first time
This is the most useful page in this document. The difference between a ticket solved in one pass and one that takes three rounds of questions is almost always what was in the first message.
What you were trying to do
Not just what broke — what you wanted to accomplish. Sometimes there's a faster route to the same goal and we'd never know to offer it.
The exact wording of any error
"An error came up" tells us nothing. A screenshot of it tells us almost everything. Windows: press Windows + Shift + S. Mac: press Cmd + Shift + 4.
When it started, and whether it's every time
"Since this morning, every time" and "once last week" are two completely different investigations.
Whether anyone else has it
If you can ask the person next to you in ten seconds, it's worth ten seconds. One person means your computer or account. Everyone means the network or a service.
How to reach you, and how stuck you are
A phone number, and one honest sentence about whether you're blocked or just irritated. We're not going to think less of you for saying it's urgent — we just need to know, because "I can't work at all" and "this is annoying me" get handled differently and we can't tell which is which from the outside.
Subject: printer it's not working again. can someone look at it
Which printer? Which computer? Not working how — nothing comes out, or it comes out wrong? Is it just you? We now have to ask four questions and wait for four answers, and you're still not printing.
Subject: [Blocked] Can't print to the front desk printer My computer: FRONTDESK-02 Since: this morning, every time Error: "Printer is offline" in Word Others: Dana can print to it fine Tried: restarted my computer, printer shows power I can't send invoices out until this works. Reach me at 360-555-0142.
Everything needed to start work is here. We know it's not the printer itself, because Dana can print. That single line narrows it to your computer in one read.
Ticket writer
This is not a ticket form. Nothing here gets sent.
It is a writing aid, and that is all it is. It has no connection to {{msp}} and no way to reach us. What you type stays in this browser tab — we never see it, and it disappears when you close the page. Filling this in does not report anything. You have to send the email yourself, and this page tells you how at every step. Send it to {{supportEmail}}.
Fill in what you know — skip anything you don't. It assembles a clean, well-ordered message for you to copy into an email.
Don't know it? Rest your mouse on the {{mspShort}} icon down by
your clock, without clicking. The label that appears includes this computer's name.
Otherwise: press Windows + R, type
cmd, press Enter, then type hostname and press Enter.
Your ticket is not submitted.
Nothing has been reported and nobody has been told. You are three steps away from that, and all three are yours to do:
- Copy the block below.
- Open your email — Outlook, or whatever you normally use.
- Send it to {{supportEmail}} and press Send.
Even "Open a draft email" does not send it. It opens a message in your email program with everything filled in — you still have to look at it and press Send. If nothing happens when you click it, use Copy this text instead and paste it into a new email to {{supportEmail}}.
Worth trying before you write to us
None of this is a test, and you're never expected to fix your own computer. But these five minutes solve a genuinely large share of everyday problems — and if they don't, you've just given us useful information.
Restart properly. Not sleep — restart.
Closing the lid isn't restarting. Choose Restart from the Start menu or Apple menu and let it come all the way back up. If your computer has been on for three weeks, this is very often the whole answer. It is not a cop-out when we ask you to do it; it's the cheapest test we have.
Where to stop
Don't install anything to fix a problem, and don't run a "cleaner" or "optimiser" you found in a search result. If a fix requires downloading something, that's our job. Hand it over at that point.
If somebody phones you out of the blue offering to fix your computer — as Microsoft, as us, as anyone — the safe move is the same either way: take a name, hang up, and call {{supportPhone}} yourself. If it really was us, you'll be put straight back through.
The short version: if a message is rushing you, slow down
Nearly every successful attack on an organization like yours works by creating urgency. A deadline, a threat, a favor for someone senior. Urgency is the tell — more reliable than spelling mistakes, more reliable than a suspicious-looking address.
"I need this done right now"
Especially about money, gift cards, wire transfers, changing bank details, or sending payroll information. Real urgent requests survive a phone call to verify. Fake ones don't.
A message from a senior person that feels slightly off
Impersonating an executive by email or chat is common and effective. If your CEO messages you out of the blue asking for something unusual, verify by a method you chose — walk over, or ring the number you already have. Never reply to check.
A sign-in prompt you didn't ask for
If your phone asks you to approve a login and you weren't logging in, deny it and tell us immediately. It means someone has your password and is knocking. Repeated prompts are someone hoping you'll tap yes to make it stop.
Unexpected attachments and links
Invoices you weren't expecting, delivery notices for parcels you didn't order, shared documents from people you don't work with. Hover a link to see where it really goes before clicking.
Use the Report Phishing button in Outlook.
It sits in the toolbar along the top of your email — on the ribbon in Outlook on a computer, and behind the three-dot menu on the mobile app. One click sends it to us for analysis and takes it out of your inbox at the same time.
This is the only route we need. Please don't forward suspicious messages to anyone — not to us, not to a colleague to ask what they think. Forwarding spreads the thing you're worried about and strips out the technical detail we need to trace it. The button keeps all of that intact.
Report anything that makes you hesitate. There's no threshold to meet and no cost to being wrong — a hundred harmless reports are worth far more to us than one missed message.
Call us immediately. Speed is the whole thing.
What we can do to contain an incident depends almost entirely on how fast we start. In the first few minutes we can end active sessions, force a password reset, and establish what was actually reached. The same work a day later is a far bigger job with a far worse range of outcomes.
So call {{supportPhone}} and tell us you think you clicked something. You don't need to work out what happened first, or be certain, or have an explanation ready — establishing all of that is the job. We would always rather look into a false alarm than hear about a real one late.
Where work ends and your own life begins
There's a line between company equipment and your own, and it's worth understanding — because most of the rules on this page exist to protect your side of it just as much as your employer's.
Company equipment
The computer you were issued, the network in the building, the printers, the servers, the phone system. We can see it, patch it, secure it, and fix it, and that's what your organization pays us to do.
Your own equipment
Your personal laptop, phone, tablet, home Wi-Fi, or home printer. We don't manage these and generally can't support them — not out of reluctance, but because we have no visibility into them and no standing to change anything on a device you own.
If you genuinely need a personal device for work, start with your manager. There's often a proper way to do it, and doing it properly is much better than doing it quietly.
Please keep personal devices off the company network.
Phones, tablets, smart watches, personal laptops, games consoles — if it's yours, use the guest network where there is one, or your own cellular data. Ask us if you're not sure which network is which; we'd much rather answer that than discover the answer later.
The reason isn't suspicion of you. It's that a device nobody can see or update, sitting on the same network as company systems, is one of the most reliable ways trouble gets in. We can't patch your phone, can't tell whether it's compromised, and can't contain it if it is. Keeping it on a separate network means a problem on your device stays your device's problem.
Fine, if approved
Work email through the Outlook app. For a lot of people that's the one genuinely useful thing to have on a personal phone, and it's the one we can do safely.
Please don't
Signing in to file sync, the company drive, Teams file storage, or other work services on a device you own. Once company files land in your own downloads folder or photo library, there's no clean way to separate them again — and that becomes a problem for you as much as for your employer.
Because it's the option that leaves your phone alone.
People reasonably assume being told which email app to use is about control. It's close to the opposite. Outlook keeps work email inside the app rather than mixing it into your phone's general storage. That means if the phone is lost, or you move on to another job, work data can be removed from that one app and nothing else on the device is touched — not your photos, not your messages, not your own accounts.
Your phone's built-in mail app doesn't work that way. Work email spreads into the operating system's own storage, mixed in with everything personal. The only way to protect company data at that point is to manage the entire phone, which is far more intrusive and something nobody involved actually wants.
So Outlook is what makes having work email on your own phone possible at all without you handing over the device. It's a smaller ask, not a bigger one.
AI is genuinely useful and we're not trying to talk you out of it. The risks are specific and worth knowing, and most of them come down to one habit.
Assume anything you paste into a public AI tool doesn't come back.
It may be stored, reviewed by a person, or used to train the model. That's not a conspiracy theory — it's in the terms of most free tools. The working rule: don't put anything into an AI tool that you wouldn't email to a stranger.
Never paste in
Passwords or keys. Customer, client, patient, or student records. Employee or payroll information. Financial statements, contracts, or anything covered by an NDA or by regulation. Whole documents you didn't write and don't own.
Don't connect accounts
Signing up with your work email, or clicking "connect your Microsoft account" on an AI site, can hand over far more than people expect — often access to your whole mailbox or file storage. Ask before you connect anything to your work account.
Watch for AI that switches itself on
Meeting assistants that join calls and record them, browser extensions that read every page you visit, note-takers bundled into apps you already use. Recording a conversation may require everyone's agreement depending on where the participants are, so check before you let something record a meeting — and ask us if you're unsure.
It is confidently wrong sometimes
AI writes fluently whether or not it's correct, and it will invent details, figures, and citations without any signal that it's doing so. Check anything factual before it reaches a customer, and don't let it be the last set of eyes on something that matters.
If you want to use AI for work, just ask.
There's usually an approved way to do it, and an approved tool keeps your work out of a public model — which is better for you as well as for the business. Your manager or internal IT contact approves it; we'll set it up and show you how to use it properly. Going around it with a personal account is the version that creates problems.
One thing this changes about phishing.
Bad spelling and clumsy phrasing used to be the giveaway. They aren't any more — attackers use the same tools you do, and a scam message can now be flawlessly written and pitched perfectly at your role. Judge a message by what it's asking you to do, never by how well it's written.
Things people ask in their second week
Mostly reassurance about software you didn't install and processes nobody explained.
Your computer runs a few things we put there so we can look after it. Most of them you will never see. These are the ones you might, so that none of them ever looks alarming.
What we can and can't see
These tools let us install updates, spot security problems, and connect to help you. They are not there to watch you. We don't read your email, we don't monitor which websites you visit for your employer's benefit, and we can't see your screen unless you're in a support session you agreed to — where you'll see a clear indicator the whole time. If you're ever unsure whether a session is genuine, hang up and call us on the number in this document.
New accounts and access changes
Adding a person, giving someone access to a folder or mailbox, changing what a role can see. Your manager or internal IT contact tells us; we do it. If you ask us directly we'll be friendly about it, but we'll still go and check first.
People leaving
When someone departs, their access needs shutting off promptly — and that request has to come from an authorized person, not a colleague passing on news.
Buying software or equipment
Happy to advise on what's worth having and what it'll cost. The decision and the budget sit with your organization.
AI tools and new services
Anything that would hold company data — an AI assistant, a file-sharing service, a scheduling tool — needs approving before it's connected to your work account. See Work vs. personal for why, and what to avoid in the meantime.
- Reply to the ticket and say so plainly. "This has been open a week and I'm still stuck" is a completely reasonable message and it moves things.
- Call {{supportPhone}} and reference the ticket number. Some things unstick faster with a voice.
- Tell your manager or internal IT contact. They have a direct line to us and standing to escalate on your behalf.
We'd rather be told we're too slow than have you quietly conclude we don't care.