Network Support for Small Companies

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts average longer than ten years of real-world professional experience, in the trenches of network support, executing a wide range of technical tasks for a large mix of clients. Every Progent consultant shares a refined set of leading practices which are combined into company-wide best practices training that Progent teaches its consulting personnel. This means that you get not only world-class IT skills, but also a support engineer with field-tested approaches for using technical knowledge to fix actual network problems quickly.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent’s staff of network engineers is composed of among the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. Averaging more than a decade of professional experience per engineer, Progent's Microsoft Certified experts offer a proven set of methods for resolving technical issues, managing projects, and delivering consulting services. The technical depth of Progent's support staff allows Progent to offer your business a consulting expert with task-relevant ability and an efficient technique for delivering quick and inexpensive network solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When required, Progent utilizes a team approach to solving the most stubborn technical issues. By aggregating hundreds of person-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts, Progent can rapidly and efficiently handle even the most vexing problems. 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 don't. Complex software compatibility issues are a minefield for even the most skilled consultants unless they bring an extensive and varied background in hands-on work with a broad range of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has incorporated the combined background of its senior engineering staff to create an in-house, corporate-wide set of best practices designed to promote fast, affordable resolutions of information technology issues and to measure and optimize client satisfaction. These practices include a powerful emphasis on customer communication and support recording. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of innovative network integration, business management, marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are significantly driven by Mr. Kent's background creating challenging information technology solutions while acting as a system architect, software developer, project manager, implementation professional and diagnostic engineer.

• Ongoing Training
  As an authorized partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent ensures that in-house consultants participate in ongoing product and methodology education that includes valuable information and procedures for technology adoption that have been developed from the experience of hundreds of thousands of computer professionals worldwide. This results in increasingly efficient provision of support to Progent's customers.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's highly evolved service reporting system provides detailed records for all delivered support. Every authorized Progent staff consultant has complete availability of all the specifics of support provided by any engineer to every customer. This database of problems and resolutions, plus false alarms and miscues, is arranged as readily searchable in-house database that enables Progent's consultants to communicate their knowledge corporate-wide to ensure that the general effectiveness of Progent's support grows continuously. This database also eliminates your reliance on a single engineer by allowing any Progent expert to take up where another stopped while saving time wasting getting familiar with your network setup. Another advantage of Progent's support documentation system is that your business can more easily handle IT support duties internally if it becomes economical to do so, or you can migrate to another IT outsourcing firm if you become unhappy with Progent's support.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger initiatives, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) methodology for delivering support. MSF divides projects into discrete and manageable phases that minimize the risk of a project getting off track. Each step builds a solid base for the completion of following phases. Planning and integration issues are defined early in the project cycle so problems can be anticipated and resolved before customer workflow is disrupted. In addition, this keeps expenses from going through the roof due to unforeseen problems during large scale roll outs. All project components are documented to build a detailed description of consulting services delivered and to help in continuing system maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified support associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the industry's most extensive information technology knowledge bases and resources. Some of the most powerful technical databases accessible by Progent's consultants are the industry best practices incorporated into the various Management Packs created by Microsoft and third parties to be used with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the proactive network monitoring software used as the foundation of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs contain custom designed scripted rules that will react to events, performance margins, and warnings monitored by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Management Packs can also provide valuable advice on how to deal with specific issues by programmatically extracting relevant 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.