Network Help for Small Organizations

Key features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Experts
  Progent’s staff of IT engineers is made up of some the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco experts in Northern California. With more than 10 years of real-world experience for each consultant, Progent's Microsoft qualified experts bring a tested set of methods for solving technical problems, planning projects, and delivering professional support. The technical depth of Progent's engineering team allows Progent to provide your company a consulting expert with tested skills and an effective approach for finding fast and inexpensive IT solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When required, Progent utilizes a team technique to resolving the most stubborn network problems. By leveraging hundreds of person-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco certified professionals, Progent can rapidly and cost-effectively handle even the most challenging issues. Consulting with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of sophisticated implementation and configuration projects every year offers Progent a special view on which techiques work and which don't. Subtle software interactions are a potential trap for even the most talented consultants unless they have an extensive and diverse history in real-world work with a broad range of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has incorporated the aggregate experience of its senior consulting staff to develop an in-house, corporate-wide collection of best practices designed to promote timely, affordable solutions of information technology issues and to measure and maximize customer approval. These methodologies include a strong emphasis on client communication and services recording. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 25-year background of innovative technology consulting, business management, marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are strongly influenced by Mr. Kent's background creating challenging technical solutions while working as a system architect, software developer, project manager, deployment expert and troubleshooter.

• Ongoing Training
  As an authorized partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent ensures that staff consultants undergo ongoing product and best-practices education that contains valuable information and procedures for technology adoption that have been developed from the experience of thousands of technical experts worldwide. This results in continually more effective delivery of support to Progent's clients.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's highly evolved service reporting system offers detailed records for all delivered support. Each Progent staff consultant has complete access to the details of services delivered by any consultant to each customer. This history of problems and solutions, plus false alarms and missteps, is arranged as readily accessible internal information store that allows Progent's support professionals to share their experiences company-wide to ensure that the overall effectiveness of Progent's consulting services grows continuously. This database also reduces your reliance on an individual consultant by allowing any Progent expert to take up where another left off while saving hours spent getting familiar with your network setup. An additional benefit of Progent's service documentation database is that your company can more smoothly handle IT support services in house if it appears cost-effective to do so, or you can migrate to a different consulting firm if you grow dissatisfied with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major projects, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework model for providing service. MSF breaks down projects into distinct and manageable phases that reduce the risk of a project getting off track. Every phase builds a strong foundation for the completion of following phases. Design and deployment issues are defined early in the project continuum so difficulties can be anticipated and dealt with before client workflow is disrupted. In addition, this prevents expenses from going through the roof because of unforeseen crises during major roll outs. All project components are recorded to build a comprehensive database of consulting services delivered and to help in continuing network maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified support associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's most extensive technical knowledge bases and resources. Some of the most helpful technical knowledge bases available to Progent's engineers are the industry best practices built into the various Management Packs published by Microsoft and third parties for use in conjunction with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the proactive server monitoring software that is the foundation of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs consist of specially built scripted rules that can respond to events, performance margins, and warnings monitored by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Management Packs can also give valuable advice on how to deal with certain problems by automatically finding relevant technical notes from the extensive Microsoft Knowledge Base.

For an example of how Microsoft Operations Manager helped a San Francisco Bay Area business achieve enterprise-class network management, read the Microsoft Operations Manager Case Study.

To contact Progent about consulting services for your small business network, call 1-800-993-9400 or send email to network-support-help@progent.com.