Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified experts average longer than ten years of hands-on professional experience, at the forefront of network service, executing a wide variety of IT projects for an extensive array of businesses. Each Progent support professional shares a proven set of leading practices that are incorporated into company-wide best practices standards that Progent instills in its support team. This guarantees that you get not only expert IT skills, but also a consultant with field-tested methods for using technical knowledge to resolve actual IT problems quickly.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

  • Individual Professionals
    Progent’s team of IT engineers is composed of some the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. Averaging more than a decade of real-world experience per engineer, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts offer a proven set of methods for solving technical issues, managing projects, and providing professional support. The technical scope of Progent's support staff allows Progent to offer your company a consultant with tested skills and an efficient approach for delivering quick and affordable IT solutions.

  • Reliance on Teamwork
    When required, Progent utilizes a group approach to solving the most difficult network issues. By aggregating hundreds of man-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified professionals, Progent can quickly and cost-effectively handle even the most challenging issues. Consulting with hundreds of clients and completing thousands of complex deployment and integration jobs every year offers Progent a special perspective on which approaches work and which ones do not. Complex software compatibility issues are a potential trap for even the most skilled consultants unless they bring an extensive and diverse history in real-world work with a broad variety of technologies.

  • Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
    Progent has used the combined experience of its top engineering personnel to develop an in-house, corporate-wide set of best practices designed to promote timely, cost-effective solutions of information technology problems and to track and optimize client satisfaction. These methodologies include a powerful focus on client communication and services documentation. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of successful technology integration, corporate management, sales and marketing, and operations. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are strongly driven by Mr. Kent's background creating complex information technology solutions while acting as a system architect, program developer, task manager, implementation professional and diagnostic engineer.

  • Continuing Professional Education
    As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent ensures that in-house engineers participate in ongoing technical and best-practices training that includes valuable information and procedures for new product integration that have been developed from the practice of thousands of computer experts worldwide. This promotes increasingly effective delivery of support to Progent's clients.

  • Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
    Progent's advanced service documentation system provides detailed documentation for all delivered services. Every authorized Progent team member has complete access to all the specifics of support delivered by any consultant to each customer. This history of problems and solutions, as well as false alarms and miscues, is arranged as readily accessible internal information store that enables Progent's consultants to communicate their knowledge company-wide so that the general effectiveness of Progent's support grows continuously. This database also reduces your dependence on a single consultant by making it possible for one Progent consultant to pick up where another left off while minimizing hours spent getting up to speed on your information system environment. An additional advantage of Progent's support documentation database is that your company can more smoothly take on IT support services internally if it becomes economical to do so, or you can move to another consulting firm if you become unhappy with Progent's support.

  • Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
    For larger initiatives, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for delivering support. MSF breaks down projects into discrete and rational components that reduce the risk of a project falling out of control. Each step creates a solid foundation for the success of later phases. Design and integration requirements are identified early in the project cycle so problems can be anticipated and resolved before customer producivity is disrupted. This also keeps costs from skyrocketing because of unforeseen crises during large scale roll outs. All project components are documented to create a comprehensive description of consulting services provided and to help in ongoing network maintenance.

  • Access to External Support Databases
    As certified consulting partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the world's most extensive technical databases and resources. Some of the most powerful technical databases available to Progent's consultants are the operational leading practices incorporated into the various Management Packs published by Microsoft and other vendors to be used with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the automated server monitoring platform used as the basis of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs (MPs) contain specially built scripted rules that will respond to events, performance margins, and warnings tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Management Packs can also give expert advice on how to deal with certain issues by programmatically finding relevant technical notes from the extensive Microsoft Knowledge Base.
To get in touch with Progent for mid-size business network support, call 1-800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.

More topics of interest: