Computer Support for Small Companies

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent's team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts average longer than a decade of hands-on professional experience, in the trenches of IT service, performing a wide variety of IT tasks for an extensive mix of businesses. Each Progent support professional shares a refined collection of best practices which are combined into shared best practices training that Progent instills in its consulting team. This ensures that you get not just world-class IT skills, but also a support engineer with field-tested methods for applying technical knowledge to solve actual network problems quickly.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent's staff of IT engineers is composed of some the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than 10 years of real-world background per engineer, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts bring a tested set of methodologies for resolving network problems, planning projects, and delivering professional services. The technical scope of Progent's support team enables Progent to provide your company a consulting expert with task-relevant ability and an efficient technique for delivering fast and affordable IT solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When required, Progent utilizes a group technique to resolving the most stubborn technical problems. By leveraging hundreds of man-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier professionals, Progent can quickly and efficiently solve even the most challenging problems. Working with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of complex deployment and configuration projects annually offers Progent a special view on which techiques work and which don't. Subtle software compatibility issues are a minefield for even the most skilled consultants unless they have an extensive and diverse background in real-world work with a wide range of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has used the combined experience of its top engineering staff to develop an internal, company-wide collection of leading practices designed to ensure fast, cost-effective solutions of technical problems and to measure and optimize client approval. These practices include a strong emphasis on customer communication and support recording. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of innovative network consulting, business management, marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are significantly driven by Mr. Kent's experiences developing challenging information technology solutions while acting as a system designer, program developer, project manager, implementation professional and troubleshooter.

• Ongoing Training
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent ensures that in-house consultants participate in ongoing technical and best-practices education that contains important lessons and methods for new product adoption that have been gleaned from the practice of thousands of computer professionals 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 documentation for all provided services. Each authorized Progent staff member has full access to the details of services delivered by any staff member to each client. This history of issues and solutions, plus false alarms and miscues, is organized as readily accessible in-house database that allows Progent's consultants to share their knowledge corporate-wide to ensure that the overall effectiveness of Progent's support expands over time. This database also reduces your dependence on a single consultant by making it possible for one Progent consultant to take up where another left off while minimizing hours wasting getting up to speed on your network setup. Another advantage of Progent's service documentation system is that your company can more easily take on IT management services in house if it appears economical to do so, or you can move to another IT outsourcing firm if you grow dissatisfied with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major initiatives, Progent consultants follow the Microsoft Solutions Framework methodology for delivering service. MSF divides projects into distinct and manageable components that reduce the risk of a project falling out of control. Every phase builds a solid foundation for the completion of following phases. Planning and integration issues are defined at the start of the project continuum so difficulties can be pi pointed and resolved before client producivity is impacted. In addition, this keeps expenses from skyrocketing due to unexpected problems during production roll outs. All phases are recorded to create a comprehensive description of technical services delivered and to help 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 resources. Some of the most powerful support knowledge bases available to Progent's engineers are the operational leading practices incorporated into the assorted Management Packs created by Microsoft and third parties to be used in conjunction with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the proactive network monitoring platform that is the basis of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs consist of custom built processing rules that will respond to events, thresholds, and warnings tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Management Packs can also provide expert suggestions on how to handle certain issues by programmatically extracting appropriate articles 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.