Client PortalManaged IT for training organisations
IT Support for Training Organisations and RTOs
Most businesses can absorb a bad technology morning. A training business cannot, because the room is already full. Twelve people have taken a day away from their own work, some of them have driven down from Melbourne, and the session starts whether or not the screen does.
That is the thing which makes training different from almost every other industry we work with. Your failures are public, they are scheduled, and they happen in front of the people paying for the room.
Want the number first? Our pricing is published: AgileCORE from $85 and AgileCOMPLETE from $130 per user per month ex GST, plus the AgileSECURE add-on at $44. Estimate your monthly figure in two minutes, or book a conversation.
Three mornings we have been called into
None of these are complicated. All of them are expensive.
Every trainer has a version of these stories, which is why they are worth setting out plainly rather than describing in the abstract. In each case the fix is ordinary, and in each case it had to be in place beforehand.
09:02
The room laptop will not drive the screen, and a cable that worked last Thursday does not work today.
Rooms need a standard, not a drawer. The same make of machine, the same adapters, the same configuration, checked on a cycle rather than discovered at the start of a session. Where a venue supplies the equipment, the trainer carries a kit that does not depend on what is in the lectern.
09:40
Half the participants cannot sign in to the learning platform, and nobody in the room can reset a password.
Somebody delivering a session should not also be the help desk. That means access is set up and tested before the day, and when it does fail there is a number that answers rather than an email that is read tonight. It also means the platform is not reached through a single shared account that one person controls.
13:15
The online half of the cohort has dropped out, and the people in the room are watching you deal with it.
Hybrid delivery is a design problem before it is a connectivity problem. The connection into the room gets sized and tested for what you actually do, the fallback path is agreed in advance, and somebody other than the facilitator owns the online room.
The part that is not about the room
Your records have to outlive the course by years
If you are a registered training organisation, you are expected to produce student and assessment evidence long after the cohort has finished, and the periods are set out in the standards you are registered under. Even where you are not an RTO, a corporate client who paid for a programme can ask what was delivered and to whom, sometimes years later, usually at the least convenient moment.
None of that is a technology question until you try to do it, and then it is nothing else. We make sure the student management system, the learning platform and whatever sits in Microsoft 365 are managed, retained for as long as you have decided, backed up, and restorable, with a restore tested by performing one rather than assumed from a report nobody opens. What has to be kept and for how long is your decision and your regulator's; making sure it survives is ours.
The access nobody closes
Contract trainers arrive for a programme and leave with the keys
Training runs on associates. Someone is engaged for a programme, needs the materials, the platform and a mailbox on day one, and finishes three months later. Where removing that access is a person's memory rather than a process, it does not happen, and the account list grows a tail of people who have not delivered for you in years.
That matters more here than in most industries, because your materials are the asset. A contract trainer who keeps access to the current version of your programme keeps a copy of your product.
What we put in place
- Joining and leaving as a standard process, with the leaving half actually done
- Access granted for the engagement, with an end date on it
- Materials in a governed location rather than emailed as attachments
- One current version of a programme, with the older ones still in history
- A record showing when access was given and when it was removed
Scope
What we take responsibility for
Agreed in writing on day one in a Responsibility and Accountability Matrix.
Delivery, in the room and online
Standardised equipment for training rooms and trainers, connectivity sized and tested for hybrid delivery, and a support arrangement that answers during a session rather than after it.
The platforms behind the programme
Microsoft 365 managed properly, and the platform your learning and student management systems run on monitored, backed up and restorable, with the vendor relationships handled so your programme manager is not the escalation path.
People, materials and security
Named accounts, multi-factor authentication, access that ends when an engagement does, materials held in one governed place, and monitoring aligned to the SMB1001 maturity framework through AgileSECURE.
Published pricing
AgileMANAGED: structured IT from $85 per user / month
We publish our pricing because a business that quotes a programme to the day deserves to know the number before the first meeting, not after the third.
AgileCORE
Remote support, monitoring, security baselines and Microsoft 365 management. Suits a training business whose delivery runs from client sites and hired rooms.
View AgileCORE →AgileCOMPLETE
Everything in CORE, plus onsite support, managed servers with 24/7 monitoring, and quarterly business reviews. The usual fit where you run your own training rooms.
View AgileCOMPLETE →Where we work
Based in Mornington, working across the training corridor
Agile IT Solutions has been based in Mornington since 2007.
Several of the training businesses we look after deliver in and around Frankston, which has long been one of the education and training centres of the southern corridor. Most issues are resolved remotely, and onsite support across our service area is included with AgileCOMPLETE, which matters on a day when a room has to work.
If you would rather see how we work before talking about your own delivery, our case studies set out what we actually did and what changed.
Questions
IT questions from training organisations
We deliver at client sites and hired venues. Can you support that?
Yes, and it changes what the answer looks like. When you do not control the venue, the resilience has to travel with the trainer: a standardised machine, a kit of adapters that does not assume what is in the lectern, a mobile connection that works when the venue wi-fi will not carry you, and material available offline. We build for the venue being unhelpful, because often it is.
Do you support our learning platform or student management system?
We do not write it and we are not its consultant. We take responsibility for everything underneath it: the platform it runs on, the data, the backups, the devices and the connectivity that reach it, and the vendor relationship when something needs escalating. When the fault sits in the application, we deal with that vendor rather than handing you back a ticket number.
Something breaks mid-session. What actually happens?
You call, and a person answers. Support hours and the way urgent work is handled are set out in the agreement before you sign it, rather than discovered during a session. The more useful half of the answer is the part that happens earlier: standard equipment, tested access and an agreed fallback mean most of the mid-session calls stop happening at all.
How long do we need to keep student records, and can you prove we still can?
The retention period is a question for your standards and your regulator, not for us, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we make sure of is that whatever you decide actually happens: retention configured rather than manual, records in a governed location, and restores tested by performing one, with the result written down. An untested backup of a four-year-old cohort is an assumption, not a record.
Our trainers use their own laptops. Is that a problem?
It is the single most common cause of the problems at the top of this page, and it is also a materials risk, because your programme ends up on a machine you do not manage and cannot clear. The workable middle ground is that anyone delivering under your name does it from a managed device, whether you own it or they do. We will tell you plainly what that costs and what it fixes.
How do we get started?
A discovery conversation, and for a training business it helps to see a room set up as it would be on a delivery day. We work out what you run on today, how it is managed and where the gaps are, then set out what a structured managed service would look like. No obligation and no quote pushed at you in the first meeting.