Network Support for Small Companies

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent's team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier consultants average more than ten years of real-world industry background, in the trenches of IT support, executing a wide variety of technical projects for a large mix of businesses. Each Progent consultant shares a refined collection of best practices that are incorporated into company-wide best practices training that Progent instills in its support personnel. This ensures that you get not just world-class IT skills, but also a consultant with field-tested methods for applying technical knowledge to resolve actual network problems quickly.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent's staff of network engineers is composed of among the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than a decade of professional background per engineer, Progent's Microsoft Premier experts offer a tested set of methods for resolving technical problems, managing projects, and providing consulting support. The technical depth of Progent's engineering team enables Progent to offer your company a consultant with task-relevant skills and an effective approach for delivering quick and affordable network solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When required, Progent relies on a group technique to resolving the most difficult technical problems. By leveraging hundreds of person-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts, Progent can quickly and cost-effectively handle even the most challenging issues. Working with hundreds of customers and completing thousands of sophisticated deployment and integration jobs annually gives Progent a special view on which techiques succeed and which don't. Complex software interactions are a minefield for even the most talented engineers unless they have an extensive and varied background in hands-on work with a wide variety of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has used the aggregate experience of its top consulting personnel to develop an in-house, corporate-wide set of best practices intended to ensure timely, cost-effective solutions of information technology issues and to measure and optimize customer satisfaction. These practices include a powerful emphasis on customer communication and support recording. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of successful technology consulting, corporate management, marketing, and administration. Progent's company-wide best practices are significantly influenced by Mr. Kent's experiences developing complex information technology solutions while working as a network architect, program developer, project manager, implementation expert and diagnostic engineer.

• Ongoing Training
  As an authorized partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent makes sure that staff engineers undergo continued product and methodology education that contains important lessons and methods for new product integration that have been developed from the practice of thousands of technical professionals around the world. This results in continually more efficient provision of services to Progent's customers.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's highly evolved service reporting system provides comprehensive documentation for all delivered support. Each authorized Progent team member has complete availability of all the details of support delivered by any staff member to each client. This database of issues and resolutions, as well as false alarms and miscues, is organized as an easily accessible in-house information store that enables Progent's consultants to communicate their knowledge company-wide so that the general effectiveness of Progent's support grows over time. This database also reduces your dependence on an individual consultant by allowing any Progent expert to take up where another stopped while minimizing hours wasting getting familiar with your network environment. Another advantage of Progent's support reporting system is that your business can more easily take on IT support duties internally if it becomes cost-effective to do so, or you can move to a different consulting company if you grow unhappy with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major projects, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for delivering service. MSF separates major initiatives into discrete and rational components that minimize the chance of a project getting out of control. Each phase builds a strong base for the success of later phases. Planning and integration requirements are identified at the start of the project cycle so difficulties can be anticipated and resolved before customer workflow is disrupted. This also keeps costs from skyrocketing due to unexpected problems during large scale roll outs. All phases are recorded to create a comprehensive database of technical services delivered and to help in continuing system support.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As authorized consulting partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's largest information technology databases and resources. Among the most helpful technical knowledge bases accessible by Progent's engineers are the industry best practices built into the assorted Management Packs created by Microsoft and other vendors to be used with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the automated network monitoring software used as the basis of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs consist of custom built processing rules that can respond to events, performance margins, and alerts monitored by Microsoft Operations Manager. Management Packs can also provide valuable suggestions on how to deal with specific problems by automatically finding relevant articles from the vast Microsoft Knowledge Base.

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.