Computer Help for Small Organizations

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Certified consultants average more than a decade of real-world professional experience, at the forefront of network service, performing a broad range of IT projects for a large mix of businesses. Each Progent consultant shares a proven set of best practices that are incorporated into company-wide best practices training that Progent instills in its support team. This guarantees that you get not just expert IT capability, but also a consultant with field-tested methods for applying computer knowledge to fix actual network problems efficiently.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent’s staff of IT consultants is made up of among the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. With more than 10 years of real-world background per consultant, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts bring a proven set of methods for resolving network problems, planning projects, and providing professional services. The technical depth of Progent's support team allows Progent to provide your business a consulting expert with tested ability and an efficient technique for delivering fast and affordable IT solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When required, Progent relies on a team technique to resolving the most stubborn network issues. By aggregating hundreds of man-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts, Progent can quickly and cost-effectively handle even the most challenging problems. Consulting with hundreds of clients and completing thousands of sophisticated deployment and integration projects every year gives Progent a special view on which approaches succeed and which ones do not. Subtle software compatibility issues are a potential trap for even the most talented consultants unless they bring an extensive and varied history in hands-on work with a broad variety of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has incorporated the aggregate experience of its senior consulting personnel to create an in-house, corporate-wide set of best practices designed to ensure fast, affordable resolutions of information technology problems and to measure and maximize customer approval. These practices include a strong emphasis on customer communication and support documentation. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of successful network consulting, business management, marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are strongly driven by Mr. Kent's experiences developing challenging information technology solutions while working as a system architect, program developer, project manager, deployment expert and diagnostic engineer.

• Ongoing Training
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent makes sure that staff consultants undergo ongoing product and methodology training that includes important information and procedures for new product adoption that have been gleaned from the practice of hundreds of thousands of computer experts around the world. This results in increasingly efficient delivery of services to Progent's clients.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's highly evolved service reporting system offers comprehensive records for all delivered support. Each authorized Progent staff consultant has complete availability of the details of support provided by any staff member to each customer. This record of issues and resolutions, plus false alarms and miscues, is organized as readily searchable internal database that allows Progent's consultants to share their knowledge company-wide to ensure that the general efficiency of Progent's support expands over time. This support history also eliminates your reliance on a single consultant by making it possible for one Progent consultant to take up where another left off while minimizing hours wasting getting ramped up on your information system environment. Another benefit of Progent's support reporting database is that your business can more smoothly handle network support duties internally if it appears cost-effective to do so, or you can move to another consulting company if you grow unhappy with Progent's support.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major projects, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) methodology for providing support. MSF separates major initiatives into discrete and manageable components that reduce the chance of a project falling off track. Every phase creates a solid base for the success of following phases. Planning and deployment requirements are defined early in the project cycle so problems can be anticipated and dealt with before customer workflow is impacted. In addition, this prevents costs from spinning out of control due to unforeseen crises during production roll outs. All project components are recorded to build a comprehensive description of consulting services provided and to assist in continuing system maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As authorized support associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the world's largest information technology databases and resource pool. Some of the most helpful technical knowledge bases accessible by Progent's consultants are the industry best practices built into the assorted Management Packs created by Microsoft and other vendors for use with Microsoft Operations Manager, the automated network monitoring software that is the foundation of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs (MPs) consist of custom built scripted rules that can react to events, performance margins, and alerts tracked by Microsoft Operations Manager. MPs can also provide valuable advice on how to handle specific issues by automatically extracting appropriate technical notes from the vast Microsoft support database.

For an example of how Microsoft Operations Manager helped a 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 visit Contact Progent.