Network Support for Small Organizations

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent's team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified experts average longer than ten years of hands-on industry experience, at the front lines of network service, executing a broad variety of IT tasks for a large array of businesses. Every Progent support professional shares a proven set of best practices which are combined into company-wide best practices training that Progent instills in its support staff. This guarantees that you get not only world-class technical help, but also a support engineer with field-tested approaches for using technical knowledge to resolve real-world IT problems rapidly.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent's staff of IT engineers is made up of among the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. With more than 10 years of real-world experience per engineer, Progent's Microsoft Certified experts bring a proven set of methods for resolving network issues, planning projects, and delivering consulting services. The technical depth of Progent's engineering team enables Progent to provide your business a consulting expert with task-relevant ability and an effective technique for finding quick and affordable IT solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent relies on a group approach to solving the most difficult technical problems. By aggregating hundreds of person-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified experts, Progent can rapidly and cost-effectively handle even the most vexing issues. Consulting with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of sophisticated deployment and configuration jobs every year offers Progent a special view on which approaches succeed and which don't. Subtle software compatibility issues are a potential trap for even the most skilled engineers unless they bring a long and diverse history in hands-on work with a broad variety of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has incorporated the combined background of its top engineering personnel to develop an in-house, company-wide set of leading practices designed to promote fast, cost-effective solutions of information technology issues and to track and maximize customer approval. These methodologies include a strong emphasis on customer communication and services recording. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of innovative network integration, corporate management, sales and marketing, and operations. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are strongly influenced by Mr. Kent's experiences creating challenging technical solutions while working as a network designer, program developer, project manager, deployment expert and diagnostic engineer.

• 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 lessons and methods for new product integration that have been developed from the practice 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 provided services. Each authorized Progent staff member has complete access to all the details of services delivered by any consultant to each customer. This database of problems and solutions, plus false alarms and miscues, is arranged as readily accessible internal database that allows Progent's consultants to communicate their knowledge corporate-wide so that the general efficiency of Progent's support expands over time. This database also reduces your dependence on a single consultant by making it possible for any Progent expert to take up where another stopped while minimizing hours wasting getting familiar with your network environment. An additional benefit of Progent's support documentation database is that your business can more easily take on network management duties internally if it appears cost-effective to do so, or you can migrate to a different IT outsourcing firm if you become dissatisfied with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major projects, Progent consultants use the Microsoft Solutions Framework methodology for delivering service. Microsoft Solutions Framework separates projects into discrete and manageable components that minimize the chance of a project getting out of control. Every step builds a solid foundation for the success of later phases. Planning and deployment requirements are identified at the start of the project cycle so problems can be anticipated and resolved before client producivity is disrupted. This also keeps costs from going through the roof due to unexpected problems during production deployment. All project components are documented to build a comprehensive database of consulting services delivered and to assist in continuing system maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified consulting partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the world's most extensive technical knowledge bases and resource pool. Some of the most powerful support databases available to Progent's engineers are the operational leading practices incorporated into the various Management Packs created by Microsoft and other vendors for use in conjunction with Microsoft Operations Manager, the automated network monitoring platform used as the basis of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs consist of specially built scripted rules that will react to events, performance margins, and alerts tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. MPs can also provide valuable suggestions on how to deal with specific issues by programmatically extracting appropriate 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.