Network Support for Small Companies

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts average longer than ten years of hands-on professional experience, in the trenches of IT support, executing a broad variety of IT projects for an extensive mix of businesses. 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 ensures that you get not just expert technical skills, but also a consultant with field-tested methods for applying computer knowledge to fix real-world IT problems quickly.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent’s staff of network consultants is made up of among the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than 10 years of real-world experience per consultant, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts offer a tested set of methodologies for solving network issues, managing projects, and providing professional services. The technical depth of Progent's support staff enables Progent to offer your company a consulting expert with tested ability and an efficient approach for finding quick and inexpensive network solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent relies on a group approach to resolving the most difficult technical issues. By aggregating hundreds of man-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts, Progent can quickly and cost-effectively solve even the most challenging issues. Consulting with hundreds of customers and performing thousands of sophisticated implementation and configuration jobs annually gives Progent a special view on which techiques succeed and which ones do not. Subtle software compatibility issues are a minefield for even the most skilled engineers unless they bring a long and varied background in hands-on experience with a wide variety of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has used the aggregate experience of its top consulting personnel to develop an internal, company-wide collection of leading practices designed to promote fast, cost-effective solutions of information technology problems and to track and optimize customer satisfaction. These methodologies include a powerful focus on customer communication and support documentation. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of successful technology integration, business management, sales and marketing, and administration. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are strongly influenced by Mr. Kent's background developing challenging technical solutions while working as a network architect, program developer, project manager, implementation professional and diagnostic engineer.

• Ongoing Training
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent ensures that staff engineers undergo ongoing product and best-practices training that includes important lessons and procedures for technology adoption that have been developed from the practice of thousands of technical experts worldwide. This results in continually more efficient provision of support to Progent's clients.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's highly evolved service reporting system offers detailed documentation for all delivered support. Each authorized Progent staff member has full access to all the details of support provided by any staff member to every customer. This record of problems and resolutions, plus false alarms and miscues, is organized as an easily searchable internal database that allows Progent's consultants to share their knowledge corporate-wide to ensure that the overall effectiveness of Progent's support grows continuously. This database also eliminates your dependence on an individual engineer by allowing any Progent consultant to take up where another stopped while saving time wasting getting ramped up on your network setup. An additional advantage of Progent's support documentation database is that your business can more easily handle network support services in house if it appears cost-effective to do so, or you can migrate to another IT outsourcing company if you grow dissatisfied with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger projects, Progent consultants follow the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for delivering service. Microsoft Solutions Framework breaks down major initiatives into discrete and manageable phases that minimize the risk of a project falling out of control. Every step creates a strong foundation for the completion of later phases. Design and deployment issues are defined at the start of the project continuum so problems can be anticipated and dealt with before client producivity is disrupted. This also keeps costs from going through the roof due to unexpected crises during major deployment. All project components are recorded to build a detailed database of consulting services provided and to help in continuing network maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As authorized consulting associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the industry's largest information technology knowledge bases and resource pool. Among the most helpful technical databases available to Progent's consultants are the operational leading practices incorporated into the various Management Packs published 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 (MPs) contain specially built scripted rules that will react to events, performance margins, and alerts monitored by Microsoft Operations Manager. Management Packs can also provide expert suggestions on how to handle specific issues by automatically extracting appropriate technical notes 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.