Computer Help for Midsize Businesses

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent's staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts average longer than a decade of real-world professional experience, at the forefront of IT service, performing a wide range of IT projects for an extensive mix of customers. Every Progent consultant shares a refined collection of leading practices that are incorporated into shared best practices standards that Progent teaches its support team. This ensures that you get not just world-class IT help, but also a consultant with proven methods for applying technical knowledge to solve actual network problems rapidly.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent's team of IT consultants is composed of among the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. With more than 10 years of real-world experience per engineer, Progent's Microsoft Certified experts offer a proven set of methods for resolving network problems, managing projects, and providing consulting services. The technical scope of Progent's engineering staff allows Progent to offer your company a consultant with task-relevant skills and an efficient approach for delivering fast and affordable IT solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent relies on a team technique to solving the most difficult technical issues. By leveraging hundreds of person-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified professionals, Progent can rapidly and cost-effectively solve even the most vexing issues. Working with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of sophisticated deployment and integration jobs annually gives Progent a special perspective on which approaches work and which ones do not. Subtle software compatibility issues are a minefield for even the most skilled engineers unless they have an extensive and diverse history in hands-on work with a wide variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has used the combined experience of its top consulting staff to create an internal, company-wide collection of best practices intended to ensure timely, cost-effective resolutions of information technology issues and to track and maximize client approval. These methodologies include a strong focus on customer communication and support documentation. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of innovative technology integration, corporate management, marketing, and operations. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are strongly influenced by Mr. Kent's experiences developing complex information technology solutions while acting as a system architect, program developer, task manager, deployment professional and diagnostic engineer.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As an authorized partner with Microsoft, Progent makes sure that in-house consultants undergo ongoing product and best-practices education that includes valuable lessons and methods for new product adoption that have been developed from the practice of thousands of technical professionals worldwide. This results in continually more effective delivery of services to Progent's customers.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system provides comprehensive documentation for all delivered services. Every authorized Progent team member has complete availability of all the specifics of services provided by any engineer to every client. This record of issues and solutions, as well as false alarms and missteps, is arranged as an easily searchable in-house database that enables Progent's support professionals to communicate their knowledge company-wide so that the general effectiveness of Progent's support grows over time. This support history also reduces your reliance on a single engineer by making it possible for one Progent expert to pick up where another left off while saving time wasting getting familiar with your network setup. An additional benefit of Progent's support documentation database is that your business can more smoothly take on IT support services in house if it appears cost-effective to do so, or you can move to a different IT outsourcing company if you become unhappy with Progent's support.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger initiatives, Progent consultants follow the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for providing service. Microsoft Solutions Framework separates major initiatives into distinct and rational components that minimize the chance of a project falling out of control. Every step creates a solid base for the completion of later phases. Planning and deployment issues are identified at the start of the project cycle so difficulties can be anticipated and resolved before client workflow is impacted. In addition, this prevents costs from skyrocketing due to unforeseen problems during large scale deployment. All project components are documented to create a comprehensive database of consulting services delivered and to help in ongoing system maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As authorized support associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the industry's largest technical knowledge bases and resource pool. Among the most powerful support knowledge bases available to Progent's consultants are the operational best practices incorporated into the various Management Packs created by Microsoft and third parties to be used with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the automated network monitoring platform used as the foundation of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs consist of custom built processing rules that can respond to events, performance margins, and alerts monitored by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Management Packs can also give valuable suggestions on how to deal with certain issues by programmatically finding appropriate technical notes from the extensive Microsoft support database.