Network Help for Mid-size Businesses

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent's team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified consultants average more than ten years of hands-on industry experience, at the front lines of IT support, performing a broad range of technical tasks for a large array of businesses. Each Progent consultant shares a refined collection of best practices that are combined into shared best practices standards that Progent teaches its support staff. This guarantees that you get not only expert technical skills, but also a support engineer with proven approaches for applying technical knowledge to resolve real-world IT problems efficiently.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent's staff of network consultants is made up of some the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than a decade of professional experience for each engineer, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts bring a proven set of methodologies for solving technical issues, planning projects, and delivering professional support. The technical scope of Progent's support team allows Progent to offer your business a consulting expert with tested ability and an effective approach for delivering fast and inexpensive network solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When required, Progent utilizes a group approach to solving the most stubborn technical issues. By aggregating hundreds of person-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified professionals, Progent can quickly and efficiently handle even the most challenging issues. Working with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of sophisticated deployment and configuration jobs annually offers Progent a special perspective on which techiques work and which don't. Complex software interactions are a potential trap for even the most skilled consultants unless they have a long and varied history in real-world work with a broad variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has used the aggregate background of its senior engineering personnel to create an in-house, corporate-wide set of best practices intended to promote fast, cost-effective solutions of technical issues and to measure and maximize client satisfaction. These methodologies include a strong focus on client communication and support recording. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of successful technology integration, business management, marketing, and operations. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are significantly driven by Mr. Kent's experiences developing complex information technology solutions while working as a network architect, program developer, project manager, deployment expert and troubleshooter.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As an authorized partner with Microsoft, Progent makes sure that in-house consultants undergo ongoing technical and best-practices training that includes valuable information and procedures for new product adoption that have been developed from the experience of thousands of computer professionals around the world. This promotes increasingly effective provision of services to Progent's clients.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system offers comprehensive documentation for all provided services. Each authorized Progent staff consultant has complete access to all the details of support provided by any consultant to each customer. This record of problems and resolutions, plus false alarms and miscues, is organized as readily accessible in-house information store that allows Progent's consultants to communicate their knowledge company-wide so that the general efficiency of Progent's support grows continuously. This support history also reduces your reliance on an individual engineer by making it possible for any Progent expert to take up where another left off while minimizing hours wasting getting ramped up on your information system environment. An additional benefit of Progent's support reporting system is that your company can more easily handle network support services internally if it appears economical to do so, or you can move to a different consulting company if you become dissatisfied with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger initiatives, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for providing support. MSF divides major initiatives into distinct and rational phases that reduce the risk of a project getting out of control. Each step creates a solid foundation for the completion of later phases. Design and integration requirements are defined early in the project cycle so difficulties can be pi pointed and dealt with before customer workflow is disrupted. In addition, this keeps costs from spinning out of control because of unexpected problems during major deployment. All project components are recorded to create a detailed description of technical services provided and to help in ongoing system support.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified support partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's most extensive technical databases and resources. Some of the most helpful technical databases available to Progent's consultants are the operational leading practices incorporated into the various Management Packs created by Microsoft and third parties for use in conjunction with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the proactive server monitoring software that is the basis of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs consist of custom built processing rules that will respond to events, thresholds, and alerts monitored by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. MPs can also provide expert advice on how to deal with specific problems by automatically finding relevant technical notes from the vast Microsoft support database.