Skiffer Terms of Service
Last modified on February 21, 2013

Thanks for being a user of our service. The service is provided by Groobe Corporation Doing Business As (DBA) The Skiffer Company, headquartered on Mayaguez, PR 00681, United States. By accessing Skiffer you accept and agree to be bound by the terms and provision of this agreement. In addition, when using this service, you shall be subject to any posted guidelines or rules applicable, which may be posted and modified from time to time. All such guidelines or rules are hereby incorporated by reference into the Terms of Service (TOS). ANY USSAGE OF SKIFFER WILL CONSTITUTE IN ACCEPTANCE OF THIS AGREEMENT. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO ABIDE BY THE ABOVE, PLEASE DO NOT USE SKIFFER. Please read this document carefully.

Our company is seriously committed to further developing Skiffer to continuously maximize the potential benefits of the service for the academic institutions. We as company strive to offer a great customer service and for the excellence on our service. We hope that each institution that uses Skiffer does their best with the service and acts upon he interest of achieving the goal behind it, to make a reality the use of technology for improving education in a way accessible to all academic institutions and effective in improving the lives of children worldwide.

Service Provisioning

Our Company is committed to provide access and service to the Skiffer Platform to all teachers, parents, students and administrators with access rights granted by a school official with administrative rights thru the provision of a Skiffer username and password. Access to the service will be provided from the moment the School's Skiffer Account is created thru the sign up process until the moment the account is no longer active either because of the service being cancelled by the School or the Account being terminated by our company because of a violation to the TOS or because the school failed to make payments to cover the monthly service fees corresponding to the school's student population and the contracted add-ons and services. Since the service is provided without a long term contract, the monthly fees must be paid at the beginning of each service period, except during the 30 Day Free Trial period. Failing to make those payments may result on the partial suspension or full cancellation of the School's Account. Our company reserves the rights to negotiate payment agreements with the school if requested, but is not obligated to to offer special payment agreement that differ from the one described on this TOS. The school may cancel the service at any time. After canceling the service the School will have access to it until the end of their last payed service period. The customer can reactivate their account up to a 30 days after the last day of service. After this period our company may completely delete the account and all the associated data in order to preserve resources and eliminate our company from the overhead of storing and protecting data from schools that are not longer covered by a Service Agreement. Our company has a NO REFUND POLICY, since resources are allocated at the moment of sign up an at the beginning of each service period to properly serve the client. After a new sign up using our web interface, a company representative may contact the school to verify that the account was created for a real school and with the approval of the school administration. Any unauthorized account or account not associated with a real academic institution will be deleted.

Support and Training

Our company has the responsibility to provide proper online learning resources and costumer support in order to permit the school community to learn to properly utilize the service and the contracted Add-Ons. Phone costumer support is available during our Help Desk service hours on non-holiday weekdays. Phone costumer service will be provided depending on the capacity levels or our costumer service representatives. If a costumer service representative is not available to answer at a specific moment, the user must leave a voicemail or contact by email and when one of our representatives is available he or she will contact the user back. Phone support is not intended to be abused by the costumer and our company reserve the rights to limit phone support in order to keep good service levels for all of our clients. Online support thru email or thru our Online Training Services is the preferred method for requesting costumer service. Our company is not obligated to physically visit the school for training or support since it provides proper online support. If a visit to the school is requested from a local costumer, on-site training and support sessions may incur in additional charges. The school is responsible for requiring teachers and administrative personal to participate in our online training sessions and to proactively contact our costumer service staff in case of any need for assistance. If the school doesn't follows our faculty capacitation advice and service usage implementation guidelines our company will not responsible for the ineffectiveness of our technologies in regards of their intended purpose.

User Accounts and User Access

Each user is responsible to keep their login credentials private and secured. Users must not allow access to their account to any third party. If a user forgets its username or password he or she may request a new one to the school for it to be delivered by email or thru a printed access ticket provided by the institution. FOR SECURITY REASONS OUR COMPANY IS NOT RESPONSIBLE AND WILL NEVER DEAL DIRECTLY WITH RESETTING ANY USER ACCOUNT USERNAME, PASSWORD OR ACCESS RIGHTS EXCEPT FOR THE ACCOUNT OF THE SCHOOL'S MAIN ADMINISTRATOR. Our company will no be liable for any damage, loss of data or unauthorized modification of data that results from the negligence of any user. If a user has any difficulty accessing their Skiffer Account he or she must notify the school about the situation and a school representative must contact a representative from our company in order to notify about the situation in no more than three working days. The school must provide our company with the contact information of the user making the claim and authorize any of our technicians to contact the user in order to help solve any problem that may be causing the situation. If the situation is not reported according to this TOS our company will no be liable for any damage, failure to report grades on time, not delivered messages or any loss incurred by the school.

Data Backup And Restore

If the school detects corruption or loss of data on their Skiffer Account, the school must report the situation to a representative of our company in no more than 12 hours from the detection. Our company will contact back the school in a 48-hour period to provide information about the causes of the data corruption and to coordinate fallow up procedures. If data needs to be replaced our company is committed to provide the school with a backup no older than a week since the initial notification of data corruption was reported. In order to better protect the security of our systems backups and data restores are handled exclusively by our Technical Team, thus database dumps will no be provided to users and only text based backups are available upon school request. The school is free to save data from any of the reports provided by Skiffer as a backup solution on electronic or printed formats. Our company will have a period of 7 work days to investigate the cause of any incident involving the loss or corruption of data and to restore the data from an available backup point in the event that access can be restarted safely. In the case that the school decides to suspend their account the institution has a 30 day period to request by email or telephone a backup of their data. For security reasons our company will not keep data for more than 30 days belonging to schools that are not longer active in our system and therefore not covered by a service agreement. Backups to our databases are obtained every night from 8PM to 11PM US Central Standard Time. Backups are kept in our systems for a 30 day period. Monthly backups are kept for 12 months and a final snapshot at the end of every school year, considered to be on the 15th of july, is also kept for up to 3 years. Data can only be restored to a point of a previous backup point. In order to avoid abuse, all requests for restoration of data accidentally deleted because of misuse of our software will be evaluated by our support team before determining if data is recoverable.

Intellectual Property Protection

You agree not to duplicate, publish, modify, or reverse engineer any portion of Skiffer. You agree not to resell use of the The Skiffer Platform or any portion of it or exploit it for commercial gain. "Skifer" and the corresponding logo are trademarks of Groobe Corp.

Ownership Of Data

The name of the school, logo and all the information stored by the school on our systems is sole property of the school and can not be shared or sold by our company, supplier or third party without proper authorization of the institution.

Usage Logs And User Privacy

For security reasons and developing purposes our systems log user activity including but not limited to logins, data creation, data manipulation and deletion. We may also log other usage activity such as user access to training material, sessions with our support team and attendance to training sessions hosted by our company. Anonymous data is also collected for marketing purposes on our social media pages, our marketing pages, our discussion pages and media pages. Our company will not enact or share any information stored on a school account or collected from users. Our company could not be required to share any information that might compromise our intellectual property or the safety of the information stored on our databases with a second or third party. In case of a system failure, legal litigation or in the event of loss or damage to data our company might use and share with any of our service providers and with legal authorities collected user data and information stored on the databases with the sole purpose of conducting an investigation.

Negligence

Any negligent activity from a user that results in loss of data, alteration of data, corruption of data, or leakage of data is responsibility of the user. Our compony will not be liable for any damage unless proven the problem was caused by a malfunction on our software or our business operation. If the negligence of the user causes any legal litigation, security problem, stealing of data or economical loss to our company or to any of our supplier and clients the user must respond for any economical damage and may be prosecuted legally.

Effectiveness

Skiffer is not intended to replace or alter the normal functions of the school administration, teachers and students. Therefore this service should be used to supplement those functions and manage information in the manner that best fits the needs of each individual institution. The effectiveness of the service, excluding any purely technical factor, depend solely on the proper use, responsiveness and proactive attitude of the school community. Access to Skiffer is bought by the school as a service it makes available for the school community and all aspects regarding of the academic administration and proper usage are responsibility of the school. Successful access to Skiffer assumes that users has access to adequate Internet Connection and a computer or mobile device that meets the minimum requirements for the service. Our company will not be responsible for the functioning of any hardware, software or Internet infrastructure the school uses to access the service.

Updates, Plug-ins And Feature Requests

Software updates to existing software will not result in any increase in the monthly subscription fee to the client. New modules and functionality to the service must be purchased separately and may increase the monthly subscription fee. If the client decides to move to a new service plan must or add new functionality not already included in their service plan, changes in price will be reflected on the next monthly service period. If the service was prepaid by the school in any non-monthly or annual fashion, changes in fees will be calculated for the duration of the pre-paid period and changes will not take place until new pending balances has been payed by the client. If the monthly subscription fee is reduced by any change in plan and the school has any prepaid balance, the resulting positive credit will be used to extend the number of monthly service periods already prepaid by the school. REFUNDS WILL NO BE GIVEN BECAUSE OF A CHANGE ON THE SERVICE PLAN OR INCLUDED ADD-ONS SINCE RESOURCES FOR SUPPLYING THE SERVICE TO THE SCHOOL ARE RESERVED IN ADVANCE AT THE MOMENT OF CREATING AN ACCOUNT FOR THE SCHOOL. If we discontinue a Service, where reasonably possible, we will give the client reasonable advance notice and a chance to get information out of that Service. Our company may listen to costumer requests for new features and may evaluate the integration of some or those suggestions to the system, but is not obligated to add any new functionality or to keep any existing functionality in the service. We reserve the rights to completely govern the development process of the service and decide what are the best features and implementations of technology for it.

Invoice Claims

Upon receipt of an invoice, whether printed or electronic, the customer has a period of 15 days to make a claim on it. Had an error been made by our company generating an invoice the client is not obligated to make any payment of the concurrent balance until a new invoice is generated with the proper corrections. The client will not be responsible for any erroneous billed balance. REFUNDS are prohibited unless they are required because of an error in billing or in the processing of the payment and reported no latter that 15 days after that payment was received.

Liability For Our Services

WHEN PERMITTED BY LAW, SKIFFER, AND SKIFFERS’S SUPPLIERS AND DISTRIBUTORS, WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR LOST PROFITS, REVENUES, OR DATA, FINANCIAL LOSSES OR INDIRECT, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES. TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE TOTAL LIABILITY OF SKIFFER, AND ITS SUPPLIERS AND DISTRIBUTORS, FOR ANY CLAIM UNDER THESE TERMS, INCLUDING FOR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES, IS LIMITED TO THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US TO USE THE SERVICES (OR, IF WE CHOOSE, TO SUPPLYING YOU THE SERVICES AGAIN). IN ALL CASES, SKIFFER, AND ITS SUPPLIERS AND DISTRIBUTORS, WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE THAT IS NOT REASONABLY FORESEEABLE.