Network Help for Small Organizations

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent's staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified experts average more than ten years of hands-on professional background, in the trenches of network service, performing a broad variety of technical tasks for an extensive array of customers. Each Progent consultant shares a proven collection of leading practices which are incorporated into shared best practices training that Progent teaches its support staff. This ensures that you get not only expert technical help, but also a support engineer with field-tested methods for using computer knowledge to repair real-world IT problems quickly.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent's team of network consultants is composed of among the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. Averaging more than a decade of real-world experience per engineer, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts bring a proven set of methods for resolving network issues, planning projects, and delivering consulting services. The technical scope of Progent's engineering staff allows Progent to provide your business a consulting expert with tested ability and an effective technique for finding quick and inexpensive network solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When required, Progent relies on a group approach to resolving the most stubborn technical issues. By aggregating hundreds of person-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified experts, Progent can quickly and efficiently handle even the most vexing problems. Working with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of complex implementation and configuration projects every year gives Progent a unique view on which techiques work and which don't. Subtle software interactions are a potential trap for even the most talented engineers unless they bring a long and varied history in hands-on experience with a wide range of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has used the combined background of its top consulting staff to develop an in-house, company-wide set of leading practices intended to ensure fast, cost-effective resolutions of technical problems and to measure and maximize customer approval. These methodologies include a powerful emphasis on customer communication and services documentation. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of innovative technology consulting, corporate management, marketing, and administration. Progent's company-wide best practices are significantly influenced by Mr. Kent's background creating challenging information technology solutions while working as a network architect, software developer, task manager, implementation expert and troubleshooter.

• Ongoing Training
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent ensures that staff engineers participate in ongoing technical and methodology education that includes valuable lessons and procedures for new product adoption that have been gleaned from the experience of thousands of computer experts around the world. This promotes increasingly efficient delivery of services to Progent's customers.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's highly evolved service reporting system offers comprehensive documentation for all provided services. Every Progent staff consultant has full availability of the specifics of support delivered by any consultant to each customer. This record of problems and resolutions, as well as false alarms and missteps, is organized as readily accessible in-house database that enables Progent's support professionals to share their knowledge company-wide to ensure that the overall efficiency of Progent's support grows over time. This database also eliminates your dependence on a single consultant by allowing one Progent consultant to pick up where another left off while minimizing time wasting getting ramped up on your network setup. An additional advantage of Progent's support reporting database is that your company can more smoothly take on IT management services in house if it becomes cost-effective to do so, or you can migrate to another consulting firm if you become unhappy with Progent's support.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger projects, Progent consultants use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for delivering service. Microsoft Solutions Framework breaks down major initiatives into distinct and rational phases that minimize the chance of a project getting out of control. Each step creates a solid base for the completion of following phases. Design and integration issues are identified at the start of the project cycle so problems can be anticipated and resolved before client producivity is disrupted. In addition, this prevents costs from skyrocketing because of unforeseen problems during large scale deployment. All phases are recorded to build a comprehensive description of consulting services provided and to help in ongoing system maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As authorized consulting partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's largest information technology knowledge bases and resources. Some of the most helpful support knowledge bases available to Progent's engineers are the industry leading practices built into the various Management Packs published by Microsoft and third parties for use with Microsoft Operations Manager, the proactive network monitoring software that is the foundation of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs (MPs) consist of specially designed scripted rules that can respond to events, thresholds, and warnings tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. MPs can also provide valuable advice on how to deal with certain problems by programmatically extracting relevant technical notes from the extensive 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.