Computer Network Support for Mid-size Businesses

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts average longer than a decade of hands-on industry background, at the front lines of IT support, executing a wide range of technical projects for an extensive array of clients. Every Progent consultant shares a proven collection of leading practices that are incorporated into shared best practices standards that Progent teaches its consulting staff. This guarantees that you get not just world-class technical help, but also a consultant with field-tested 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 IT engineers is composed of some the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. With more than 10 years of real-world experience per engineer, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts offer a proven set of methodologies for solving network issues, managing projects, and providing professional services. The technical depth of Progent's engineering team allows Progent to offer your company a consulting expert with task-relevant skills and an efficient technique for finding quick and inexpensive IT solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When required, Progent relies on a team approach to solving the most difficult technical issues. By aggregating hundreds of person-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified professionals, Progent can quickly and cost-effectively solve even the most vexing problems. Consulting with hundreds of clients and completing thousands of complex deployment and integration jobs every year offers Progent a unique view on which approaches work and which don't. Subtle software compatibility issues are a minefield for even the most skilled consultants unless they have a long and diverse background in hands-on work with a broad variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has used the combined experience of its senior engineering personnel to create an internal, company-wide collection of leading practices intended to promote timely, affordable solutions of technical issues and to measure and maximize customer approval. These methodologies include a powerful focus on client communication and support recording. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of successful network integration, corporate management, marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are strongly influenced by Mr. Kent's experiences creating challenging technical solutions while working as a system designer, software developer, task manager, implementation professional and troubleshooter.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As a certified partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent ensures that in-house engineers participate in ongoing product and best-practices training that contains valuable information and methods for technology integration that have been gleaned from the practice of hundreds of thousands of technical experts worldwide. This promotes increasingly efficient provision of support to Progent's customers.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system offers comprehensive documentation for all provided support. Each Progent staff consultant has full access to the specifics of support provided by any engineer to each customer. This record of issues and solutions, as well as false alarms and missteps, is arranged as readily searchable internal information store that enables Progent's support professionals to communicate their knowledge company-wide to ensure that the overall effectiveness of Progent's support expands over time. This database also eliminates your dependence on a single engineer by allowing any Progent consultant to take up where another stopped while saving hours wasting getting up to speed on your network environment. An additional benefit of Progent's support documentation system is that your business can more easily take on IT management duties internally if it appears cost-effective to do so, or you can move to a different IT outsourcing company if you become dissatisfied with Progent's support.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger initiatives, Progent consultants follow the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for delivering support. Microsoft Solutions Framework divides projects into distinct and rational phases that minimize the chance of a project falling off track. Each phase builds a solid foundation for the completion of following phases. Planning and deployment issues are identified at the start of the project continuum so problems can be anticipated and resolved before customer producivity is disrupted. This also prevents costs from going through the roof due to unforeseen crises during production deployment. All project components are documented to build a detailed database of consulting services provided and to assist in continuing system support.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified consulting partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's largest technical knowledge bases and resource pool. Some of the most powerful support databases available to Progent's engineers are the operational leading practices incorporated into the various Management Packs published by Microsoft and other vendors for use in conjunction with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the proactive network monitoring platform that is the foundation of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs contain specially built scripted rules that can respond to events, thresholds, and alerts tracked by Microsoft Operations Manager. Management Packs can also provide expert advice on how to deal with specific problems by automatically finding relevant technical notes from the vast Microsoft Knowledge Base.