Computer Help for Small Organizations

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s team of Microsoft and Cisco Certified consultants average longer than a decade of hands-on industry background, at the front lines of IT service, executing a wide variety of IT projects for an extensive mix of clients. Each Progent support professional shares a refined collection of leading practices that are combined into company-wide best practices training that Progent teaches its support team. This means that you get not just expert IT capability, but also a support engineer with field-tested approaches for using computer knowledge to fix real-world network problems quickly.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent’s team of network engineers is made up of some the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. With more than a decade of real-world background for each consultant, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts offer a proven set of methods for solving technical problems, planning projects, and delivering professional support. The technical scope of Progent's engineering team enables Progent to provide your business a consulting expert with tested ability and an effective approach for finding quick and affordable network solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent utilizes a group approach to resolving the most difficult network problems. By leveraging hundreds of man-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts, Progent can rapidly and efficiently handle even the most challenging issues. Consulting with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of sophisticated implementation and integration projects annually gives Progent a special view on which approaches work and which ones do not. Complex software interactions are a potential trap for even the most talented engineers unless they have a long and varied history in real-world work with a broad range of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has used the aggregate experience of its top engineering personnel to create an in-house, corporate-wide collection of leading practices designed to ensure fast, affordable solutions of technical issues and to track and optimize customer satisfaction. These methodologies include a powerful focus on customer communication and services documentation. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of innovative technology consulting, business management, marketing, and operations. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are strongly driven by Mr. Kent's experiences creating complex information technology solutions while acting as a system designer, software developer, task manager, implementation expert and diagnostic engineer.

• Ongoing Training
  As a certified partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent makes sure that staff consultants participate in ongoing product and best-practices training that includes important lessons and procedures for technology integration that have been developed from the practice of hundreds of thousands of technical experts worldwide. This results in increasingly efficient provision of services to Progent's clients.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's highly evolved service reporting system provides detailed records for all delivered support. Each authorized Progent team member has full availability of all the details of support provided by any engineer to each customer. This database of issues and solutions, plus false alarms and miscues, is arranged as readily accessible internal database that allows Progent's support professionals to communicate their experiences corporate-wide so that the overall efficiency of Progent's consulting services grows over time. This database also eliminates your dependence on a single engineer by allowing any Progent consultant to pick up where another stopped while saving hours wasting getting ramped up on your network setup. An additional benefit of Progent's service documentation database is that your business can more smoothly handle network management services internally if it becomes economical to do so, or you can move to another IT outsourcing firm if you become unhappy with Progent's support.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major initiatives, Progent consultants use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) methodology for delivering service. MSF breaks down projects into distinct and manageable phases that reduce the risk of a project falling out of control. Each step creates a strong base for the success of later phases. Design and deployment requirements are identified at the start of the project cycle so problems can be pi pointed and resolved before customer producivity is impacted. In addition, this keeps costs from going through the roof due to unforeseen problems during production deployment. All phases are recorded to create a comprehensive description of technical services delivered and to help in continuing network support.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified consulting associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's largest technical databases and resource pool. Among the most powerful support databases accessible by Progent's engineers are the industry best practices built into the assorted Management Packs created by Microsoft and third parties to be used in conjunction with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the automated server monitoring platform that is the basis of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs contain custom designed processing rules that will respond to events, performance margins, and alerts tracked by Microsoft Operations Manager. MPs can also provide expert advice on how to handle certain issues by programmatically extracting appropriate articles from the extensive 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.