Computer Help for Small Businesses

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts average longer than a decade of real-world professional experience, at the forefront of network support, performing a broad range of IT tasks for a large array of clients. Each Progent support professional shares a proven set of leading practices that are incorporated into company-wide best practices training that Progent teaches its support team. This means that you get not just expert IT capability, but also a consultant with field-tested approaches for using computer knowledge to solve real-world IT problems efficiently.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent’s team of IT consultants is made up of some the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than a decade of real-world experience per consultant, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts bring a proven set of methods for solving network issues, planning projects, and delivering professional support. The technical depth of Progent's support staff allows Progent to offer your company a consulting expert with tested skills and an efficient approach for finding fast and affordable network solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When required, Progent relies on a group technique to solving the most difficult technical issues. By aggregating hundreds of man-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier professionals, Progent can rapidly and cost-effectively handle even the most challenging problems. Consulting with hundreds of customers and performing thousands of sophisticated implementation and configuration jobs annually gives Progent a special perspective on which techiques succeed and which don't. Complex software compatibility issues are a minefield for even the most talented engineers unless they bring a long and diverse background in hands-on experience with a wide variety of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has incorporated the aggregate experience of its senior engineering personnel to create an in-house, company-wide collection of leading practices intended to ensure timely, affordable resolutions of technical problems and to measure and maximize client satisfaction. These practices include a strong emphasis on customer communication and services documentation. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of successful network consulting, business management, sales and marketing, and administration. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are significantly influenced by Mr. Kent's experiences developing challenging information technology solutions while acting as a system architect, program developer, task manager, deployment expert and diagnostic engineer.

• Ongoing Training
  As a certified partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent makes sure that in-house consultants undergo ongoing product and methodology training that contains valuable lessons and procedures for new product adoption that have been developed from the experience of hundreds of thousands of computer professionals around the world. This results in increasingly efficient delivery 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 provided services. Every authorized Progent team consultant has full access to all the specifics of support provided by any consultant to each customer. This record of issues and resolutions, plus false alarms and miscues, is arranged as readily accessible in-house information store that enables Progent's consultants to communicate their knowledge corporate-wide to ensure that the general efficiency of Progent's consulting services expands over time. This support history also eliminates your dependence on a single engineer by making it possible for one Progent consultant to take up where another stopped while saving time spent getting ramped up on your information system environment. Another benefit of Progent's service documentation database is that your company can more easily take on network management duties in house if it appears economical to do so, or you can migrate to another consulting firm if you grow unhappy with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major projects, Progent consultants follow the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) methodology for delivering service. Microsoft Solutions Framework separates major initiatives into discrete and rational phases that minimize the risk of a project falling out of control. Every phase creates a strong base for the completion of following phases. Design and deployment issues are identified early in the project cycle so problems can be anticipated and dealt with before client producivity is disrupted. This also prevents expenses from spinning out of control due to unexpected crises during major roll outs. All project components are recorded to build a detailed database of consulting services provided and to help in ongoing network support.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified support associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's largest technical knowledge bases and resources. Among the most powerful technical databases accessible by Progent's engineers are the operational leading practices incorporated into the various Management Packs published by Microsoft and other vendors for use in conjunction with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the proactive network monitoring platform used as the foundation of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs contain specially built processing rules that will respond to events, performance margins, and alerts tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Management Packs can also give expert advice on how to deal with specific problems by automatically finding relevant articles from the extensive Microsoft support database.

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.