Network Help for Small Businesses

Microsoft Consulting Best Practices
Progent's staff of Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts average more than ten years of real-world industry background, at the front lines of IT service, performing a broad variety of IT tasks for an extensive mix of businesses. Every Progent support professional shares a refined set of leading practices that are incorporated into shared best practices training that Progent instills in its consulting personnel. This ensures that you get not only world-class technical capability, but also a support engineer with proven approaches for using computer knowledge to resolve actual IT problems efficiently.

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

• Individual Experts
  Progent's team of network engineers is composed of among the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than 10 years of professional experience for each consultant, Progent's Microsoft Certified experts bring a tested set of methods for solving technical problems, managing projects, and providing consulting services. The technical scope of Progent's support staff allows Progent to offer your company a consultant with tested ability and an effective approach for finding quick and affordable network solutions.

• Problem Escalation Through Teamwork
  When required, Progent utilizes a group technique to solving the most stubborn technical problems. By aggregating hundreds of person-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier professionals, Progent can rapidly and efficiently handle even the most challenging issues. Working with hundreds of customers and completing thousands of complex deployment and integration jobs every year offers Progent a unique perspective on which approaches work and which don't. Complex software compatibility issues are a minefield for even the most skilled engineers unless they bring an extensive and diverse background in hands-on experience with a broad variety of technologies.

• Company-wide Standards for Best Practices
  Progent has used the aggregate background of its senior consulting staff to develop an internal, corporate-wide collection of methodologies intended to promote fast, cost-effective solutions of technical issues and to measure and optimize client satisfaction. These practices include a powerful focus on customer communication and services recording. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of successful technology consulting, corporate management, sales and marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are significantly driven by Mr. Kent's experiences creating challenging information technology solutions while acting as a network architect, program developer, task manager, deployment expert and troubleshooter.

• Ongoing Training
  As a certified partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent makes sure that in-house consultants undergo ongoing technical and methodology training that includes important lessons and procedures for technology adoption that have been gleaned from the practice of hundreds of thousands of computer experts worldwide. This promotes increasingly effective provision 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 Progent team member has full access to the specifics of services provided by any staff member to each client. This history of issues and resolutions, as well as false alarms and missteps, is organized as readily accessible internal information store that enables Progent's support professionals to share their knowledge company-wide to ensure that the general effectiveness of Progent's consulting services expands continuously. This database also reduces your dependence on an individual consultant by making it possible for one Progent consultant to pick up where another left off while saving hours spent getting up to speed on your network setup. Another advantage of Progent's service reporting system is that your business can more smoothly handle network support services in house if it appears cost-effective to do so, or you can move to a different consulting firm if you become unhappy with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major initiatives, Progent consultants use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) methodology for providing support. MSF breaks down major initiatives into distinct and manageable phases that minimize the chance of a project falling off track. Each step builds a solid foundation for the completion of following phases. Planning and integration issues are defined early in the project cycle so difficulties can be anticipated and resolved before client workflow is disrupted. In addition, this keeps expenses from spinning out of control because of unexpected problems during production deployment. All project components are documented to create a detailed database of consulting services delivered and to help in continuing system support.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified support associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's largest technical databases and resources. Some of the most powerful technical knowledge bases available to Progent's consultants are the industry leading practices built into the assorted Management Packs published by Microsoft and other vendors for use with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the automated server monitoring software that is the basis of Progent's IT outsourcing and network monitoring packages. Management Packs (MPs) contain specially designed processing rules that will respond to events, performance margins, and warnings tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. MPs can also provide valuable suggestions on how to deal with certain problems by programmatically finding appropriate technical notes 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.