Network Help for Small Organizations

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified consultants average longer than ten years of hands-on industry background, in the trenches of IT service, executing a wide variety of technical projects for an extensive mix of customers. Each Progent consultant shares a refined set of best practices which are incorporated into shared best practices training that Progent teaches its support personnel. This means that you get not only world-class technical skills, but also a support engineer with field-tested methods for applying technical knowledge to solve actual IT problems efficiently.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent’s staff of network consultants is composed of among the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. Averaging more than a decade of professional experience for each consultant, Progent's Microsoft Premier experts bring a proven set of methodologies for resolving network problems, managing projects, and delivering professional services. The technical scope of Progent's engineering staff enables Progent to provide your company a consultant with tested ability and an efficient technique for finding quick and affordable IT solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When appropriate, 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 experts, Progent can quickly and efficiently solve even the most vexing problems. Working with hundreds of customers and performing thousands of sophisticated deployment and configuration projects annually gives Progent a unique view on which approaches succeed and which don't. Complex software interactions are a minefield for even the most talented engineers unless they bring a long and varied background in hands-on work with a broad variety of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has used the aggregate background of its senior consulting staff to create an internal, company-wide collection of leading practices intended to ensure timely, cost-effective resolutions of information technology problems and to track and optimize customer satisfaction. These practices include a powerful emphasis on client communication and services documentation. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of innovative network consulting, business management, sales and marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are significantly driven by Mr. Kent's background creating challenging technical solutions while working as a network architect, program developer, task manager, implementation expert and diagnostic engineer.

• Ongoing Training
  As an authorized partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent makes sure that staff engineers undergo continued technical and best-practices training that contains important information and procedures for new product adoption 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 customers.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's highly evolved service reporting system offers comprehensive records for all delivered services. Each authorized Progent team consultant has complete access to the specifics of services delivered by any consultant to each customer. This database of problems and resolutions, plus false alarms and missteps, is arranged as an easily searchable internal database that enables Progent's consultants to share their experiences company-wide so that the general efficiency of Progent's consulting services grows over time. This support history also reduces your dependence on a single engineer by making it possible for any Progent consultant to take up where another stopped while saving time wasting getting familiar with your information system environment. Another benefit of Progent's support reporting database is that your company can more easily handle network support services internally if it becomes economical to do so, or you can migrate to a different consulting firm if you grow unhappy with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger projects, Progent engineers follow the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) methodology for providing support. Microsoft Solutions Framework breaks down major initiatives into distinct and manageable components that reduce the risk of a project falling off track. Every step builds a solid foundation for the success of later phases. Design and deployment issues are defined at the start of the project continuum so problems can be anticipated and resolved before client producivity is impacted. In addition, this keeps costs from spinning out of control because of unexpected problems during major roll outs. All phases are documented to build a detailed description of technical services delivered and to help in ongoing system maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As authorized support partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the world's largest technical databases and resources. Among the most helpful technical knowledge bases available to Progent's consultants are the operational leading practices incorporated into the assorted Management Packs created by Microsoft and third parties for use with Microsoft Operations Manager, the proactive server monitoring software that is the basis of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs consist of custom built scripted rules that will respond to events, performance margins, and warnings tracked by Microsoft Operations Manager. Management Packs can also provide valuable advice on how to handle specific problems by programmatically finding relevant 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.