Customer Support Services Commitment and SLA

Updated March 2023

Customer Support Services Commitment and SLA

Customers are vital to Kuali. Kuali provides Customer Support and a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to support its customers, ensuring they have a baseline understanding of how we provide support and clarity on what our commitments entail.

Kuali Customer Support Services Commitment and SLA

In this commitment, references to Application Services are referring to the whole suite of software that Kuali provides on a “software as a service” basis: Kuali Financials, Kuali Research, Kuali Student, Kuali Build, and Kuali Ready. Other terms used in this commitment are defined in the Definitions section below.

We will update this commitment from time to time as things change. You can always find the latest version of this commitment on the Kuali Support Page (https://kuali.co/support).

All Kuali documentation and support is provided in English.

Definitions

For the purpose of this commitment, the terms below have the following meanings:

"Designated Representative" means designated customer administrators and support representatives.

"Disaster" means an event that causes disruption of operational capabilities that renders your production Application Services unusable for a 12 hour period.

"End User" means any of your faculty members, students, staff, employees or agents whom you have authorized to access and use the Application Service.

"Feature Request" means a request to incorporate a new feature or enhance an existing feature of the Application Service that is currently not available.

"Impact" means the classification or priority of your Support Request which is used to establish target response times and how the issue is managed.

“Monthly Uptime” means the total number of minutes in a calendar month minus the number of minutes of Scheduled Downtime, minus the number of minutes of Unscheduled Downtime in a calendar month, divided by the total number of minutes in a calendar month.

“Scheduled Downtime” means periods of time Application Services will be unavailable to You for routine maintenance.

"Support Request" means a request from you to us for support to resolve a question or problem regarding the Application Service.

“Support Services” means our normal provision of advice, direction, and support via telephone and email regarding the Application Service, which we will provide in English.

“Unscheduled Downtime” means any period during which the Application Services are unavailable to you other than Scheduled Downtime.

Use of Kuali Support Services

Our Responsibilities

We will make all reasonable professional efforts to:

• Provide support services as described in this commitment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. 
• Respond to customer support requests within the target response times.
• Keep application services up to date.
• Provide current and relevant online self-help tools for end users and administrators.

Your Responsibilities

You are responsible for:

• End users’ compliance with the terms of service, the Kuali Master Subscription Agreement and any other applicable or appropriate agreements.
• Use reasonable efforts to fix errors, configuration problems, malfunctions, or network connectivity issues without escalation to us.
• Work collaboratively with Kuali support staff to resolve support requests by providing timely responses to inquiries from our support staff.

Note that despite our best efforts, we may not be able to provide answers to, or resolve, all support requests.

Services Not Provided as part of our Support Services

Some services are not provided as part of our support services and may require a separate work order. Examples include:

• Direct support to customer end users.
• Data migration issues.
• Requests for integration with 3rd party capabilities & services.
• Usage of the application services not consistent with the intended functionality of the application.
• Assistance understanding data relationships as presented in the database schema documentation in order to write or format queries.
• Non-supported 3rd party tools used with application services.
• Issues arising with products hosted by a third party unless optional support is identified in the Kuali Master Subscription Agreement.
• Issues arising from changes made to the code locally if software is used on premises and not a Saas customer.
• Issues known by us not to be related to the application service itself.
• Any data or file restoration that requires accessing backup databases or file systems will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Customer’s Designated Representatives

You may designate up to 3 individuals per Product Family (Research, Student, Financials, Ready, Build) for the purposes of initiating support requests, and you may designate substitutes as needed. These designated representatives should be staff members who have been trained as application service administrators. Designated representatives will have the ability to initiate support requests as described in this commitment.

Support Window

Designated representatives may contact us with a support request 24x7x365 using our Customer Support Portal.  Please see the Support Request Impact and Urgency section below for further detail. 

Support Request Impact and Urgency

You will designate the impact level for each support request. Upon receiving a support request from your designated representative, we will begin evaluating the request and will respond within the target response time for the designated impact level. If we have any questions about the impact level assigned to your support request, we will work with you to come to an understanding with the appropriate designation.

Impact	Description	Initial Response Time
Urgent	The service is unusable OR the majority of end users cannot access the service, OR a portion of the service is unusable causing severe and lasting business impact.	Within 30 minutes of request submission.
High	The service is materially impaired but is still functional.	Within 4 hours between 7AM and 7 PM Mon-Fri US Mountain Time, excluding Federal holidays.
Normal	The service is partially impaired, but workarounds are in place OR the service is functionally usable, but information, assistance or a new product feature is requested.	As soon as possible between 7 AM and 7 PM Mon-Fri US Mountain Time, excluding Federal holidays.

Our approach to resolution depends on the designated Impact of a request. We will use every professionally reasonable means to resolve support requests as quickly as possible.

End User Support

We provide support for customer end users only through self-help mechanisms such as our online knowledge bases and/or community forums which are available on our Customer Support Portal. Use of Kuali’s support portal for help ticket submission is limited to your designated representatives. You are responsible for responding to any questions and requests by end users or other third parties relating to end users’ use of the application services, with such support to be provided by your personnel at your expense. 

Backups and Business Continuity

For details, refer to our Kuali Security, Engineering, and Operations documentation (can be provided upon request). 

Maintenance

Default Maintenance Windows

In most cases, maintenance has limited or no negative impact on the availability and functionality of the application services. Unless otherwise arranged, these are our standard maintenance windows for customer Production and Sandbox (SBX) environments:

Kuali Ready, Kuali Build, Kuali Student, Kuali Research

Once tested and approved, Kuali Ready, Kuali Build, Kuali Student, and Kuali Research use a continuous change delivery model where changes are deployed through staging to production. Continuous changes are those where stable automated testing and deployment processes manage the commits, including critical platform updates as well as configuration and code deployments. These changes result in no system downtime for customers.

Kuali Financials

For Kuali Financials, changes are continuously staged for deployment and may be released at the following time(s):

• Nightly - 8:00 PM US Mountain Time - Validated changes may be promoted to Production

Standard Change Window

We also have a Standard Change window which is reserved for updates that cannot fit the Default Maintenance Windows. This is a standing, optional maintenance window each week:

• Production: Each Sunday, 6:00 AM to 10:00 AM US Mountain Time.
• Non-Production: Each Saturday, 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM US Mountain Time (non-production customer facing environments).

Any outage that happens within these defined windows is not considered a service outage.

Emergency Maintenance

We may perform unscheduled emergency maintenance at any time. If we expect unscheduled emergency maintenance to negatively affect the availability or functionality of the Application Services, we will use professionally reasonable efforts to provide advance notice. 

Feature Requests

Your designated representatives may request a new or enhanced product feature by submitting a support request through our Customer Support Portal.  If we deem a support request to be a feature request, we will consider it and may reach out to make sure we understand the business need behind the request. Note that once the idea is captured in our product management systems we may close the support request.  

SaaS Service Level Agreement (SLA)

This SaaS Service Level Agreement (“SLA”) is incorporated by reference into the Master Subscription agreement. It is effective between You and Us as of the date of Your accepting this Agreement.

Application Services

Service Availability Commitment.  Subject to your performance under the Agreement, including without limitation the timely payment of Fees, we will use our commercially reasonable efforts to make Application Services available for use by you and End Users at least ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent (99.9%) of the time in any calendar month, exclusive of Scheduled Downtime.  In any month where Application Services are not available for use by you and your End Users as provided above, you will be eligible to receive a reduction in price of the otherwise applicable Fees for Services according to the Service Credits provision below. The Service will be deemed unavailable if it is unresponsive for more than two (2) minutes during Planned Service Periods. 

Your Data.  You own your data.  We just make it easy for you to collect, use, and share with individuals you designate. More information on requesting copies of your data can be found in your contract.

Standard Data Protection and Archive Retention. We will: (i) mirror your production data, no less than once a day, to a cloud storage service that is geographically remote from our primary data center; and (ii) upon the occurrence of a Disaster, use reasonable business effort to provide a production operating environment for your application as soon as possible. 

General Provisions

Service Credits.  In order to receive Service Credits, you must notify us within thirty (30) days from the time you become eligible to receive a Service Credit. Failure to comply with this requirement will forfeit your right to receive a Service Credit. Service Credits may not be exchanged for, or converted to, monetary amounts

Service Credits are calculated as the percentage of time in a month that the Application Service is unavailable beyond the Service Availability Commitment listed above, multiplied by the Annual SaaS Fees paid by You, prorated for the month during which You are eligible for a Service Credit. We will apply any Service Credits against future Services at the time of service renewal or extension. Service Credits will not entitle You to any refund or other payment from Us. 

Maximum Service Credits.  The aggregate maximum number of Service Credits to be issued by us to you for all Unscheduled Downtime that occurs in a single calendar month will not exceed fifteen days (15) days of Service. 

Appendix A - SOC2 Control Reference

Controls as defined for Kuali’s implementation of SOC2. Reference IDs map to IDs found in the Tugboat tool

AT4 - User Guides

The organization has developed documentation and user guides that describe relevant system components as well as the purpose and design of the system. These documents are made available to both internal and external users and updated as needed.