Network Support for Small Companies

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent's team of Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts average longer than ten years of hands-on professional background, in the trenches of network support, performing a broad variety of IT projects for an extensive mix of businesses. Each Progent consultant shares a refined set of best practices that are combined into shared best practices training that Progent teaches its consulting personnel. This guarantees that you get not only expert IT capability, but also a support engineer with proven approaches for using computer knowledge to repair real-world IT problems efficiently.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent's staff of IT consultants is composed of among the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than a decade of professional experience per engineer, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts bring a proven set of methodologies for solving technical issues, managing projects, and delivering consulting services. The technical scope of Progent's engineering staff enables Progent to offer your business a consulting expert with task-relevant ability and an efficient technique for delivering fast and affordable network solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent utilizes a group technique to resolving the most difficult technical problems. By aggregating hundreds of man-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified professionals, Progent can rapidly and cost-effectively handle even the most vexing issues. Working with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of complex implementation and configuration jobs annually gives Progent a special perspective on which approaches succeed and which don't. Subtle software compatibility issues are a potential trap for even the most skilled consultants unless they bring an extensive and diverse history in hands-on work with a wide variety of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has incorporated the aggregate experience of its senior engineering staff to develop an internal, corporate-wide set of methodologies intended to promote timely, affordable resolutions of information technology problems and to measure and maximize customer satisfaction. These practices include a strong emphasis on client communication and support recording. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of innovative technology integration, business management, sales and marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are significantly influenced by Mr. Kent's background developing complex information technology solutions while acting as a network designer, program developer, task manager, implementation professional and diagnostic engineer.

• Ongoing Training
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent ensures that in-house engineers participate in ongoing product and best-practices education that contains valuable information and methods for technology integration that have been gleaned from the practice of hundreds of thousands of computer professionals worldwide. This promotes 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 support. Every Progent staff consultant has complete availability of all the details of services delivered by any engineer to each customer. This history of problems and resolutions, as well as false alarms and miscues, is arranged as an easily accessible in-house database that enables Progent's consultants to share their experiences corporate-wide to ensure that the general effectiveness of Progent's support grows continuously. This database also eliminates your dependence on a single engineer by allowing any Progent expert to pick up where another stopped while minimizing time wasting getting up to speed on your information system setup. An additional advantage of Progent's support documentation system is that your company can more easily take on IT support services in house if it appears economical to do so, or you can migrate to another IT outsourcing firm if you grow dissatisfied with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major initiatives, Progent engineers follow the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for delivering service. MSF breaks down major initiatives into discrete and rational components that minimize the risk of a project getting off track. Each phase creates a strong foundation for the success of following phases. Design and deployment issues are identified at the start of the project continuum so problems can be anticipated and resolved before customer producivity is disrupted. In addition, this prevents expenses from going through the roof due to unforeseen problems during large scale roll outs. All phases are recorded to build a detailed description of technical services delivered and to assist in ongoing system support.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified support associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the world's largest information technology knowledge bases and resources. Among the most powerful support knowledge bases accessible by Progent's engineers are the industry leading practices incorporated into the various Management Packs created by Microsoft and other vendors for use with Microsoft Operations Manager, the automated network monitoring platform that is the basis of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs (MPs) contain specially designed processing rules that can react to events, performance margins, and alerts tracked by Microsoft Operations Manager. Management Packs can also provide expert advice on how to deal with certain issues 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.