Network Help for Mid-size Businesses

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier consultants average more than a decade of hands-on industry background, at the forefront of IT service, performing a wide range of IT tasks for a large mix of businesses. Every Progent support professional shares a refined collection of leading practices which are incorporated into company-wide best practices training that Progent teaches its consulting personnel. This guarantees that you get not only expert technical help, but also a support engineer with proven approaches for using technical knowledge to repair real-world network problems efficiently.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent’s team of IT engineers is composed of some the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. Averaging more than 10 years of real-world experience per consultant, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts bring a tested set of methods for solving technical problems, planning projects, and delivering professional support. The technical scope of Progent's support staff allows Progent to provide your company a consulting expert with tested ability and an effective technique for finding fast and inexpensive network solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent relies on a group technique to resolving the most difficult technical problems. By aggregating hundreds of man-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified professionals, Progent can rapidly and cost-effectively handle even the most challenging issues. Working with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of complex implementation and integration projects annually gives Progent a unique view on which techiques work and which ones do not. Complex software interactions are a potential trap for even the most skilled consultants unless they bring a long and varied history in real-world experience with a broad variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has used the aggregate background of its top consulting personnel to create an internal, corporate-wide set of best practices intended to promote timely, cost-effective resolutions of information technology problems and to measure and maximize customer satisfaction. These methodologies include a strong focus on customer communication and services documentation. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of innovative network consulting, business management, sales and marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are strongly influenced by Mr. Kent's background creating complex technical solutions while working as a network architect, program developer, project manager, deployment expert and diagnostic engineer.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent ensures that in-house consultants participate in ongoing technical and best-practices training that contains valuable lessons and procedures for new product integration that have been gleaned from the experience of hundreds of thousands of computer experts worldwide. This promotes continually more effective provision of support to Progent's clients.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system provides detailed records for all provided support. Each Progent team consultant has complete access to the details of services provided by any staff member to each client. This record of problems and resolutions, as well as false alarms and missteps, is arranged as an easily searchable in-house information store that enables Progent's consultants to communicate their experiences corporate-wide to ensure that the overall effectiveness of Progent's support grows continuously. This support history also reduces your dependence on a single engineer by allowing any Progent consultant to pick up where another left off while minimizing hours spent getting familiar with your network setup. Another advantage of Progent's service reporting database is that your business can more smoothly take on network support services internally if it becomes economical to do so, or you can migrate to another IT outsourcing company if you become unhappy with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major initiatives, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework methodology for delivering service. MSF separates major initiatives into distinct and manageable phases that reduce the chance of a project falling off track. Every phase builds a strong foundation for the completion of following phases. Planning and integration requirements are defined early in the project cycle so problems can be pi pointed and dealt with before client workflow is disrupted. This also keeps costs from going through the roof due to unexpected problems during large scale deployment. All phases are recorded to build a comprehensive database of consulting services delivered and to help in ongoing network maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified consulting associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the world's largest technical databases and resources. Some of the most helpful support knowledge bases available to Progent's consultants are the operational leading practices built into the various Management Packs created by Microsoft and other vendors for use with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the proactive network monitoring software used as the basis of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs (MPs) contain custom designed scripted rules that can react to events, performance margins, and alerts tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. MPs can also provide valuable suggestions on how to deal with specific problems by automatically finding relevant articles from the vast Microsoft Knowledge Base.