Computer Support for Medium-size Companies

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified consultants average longer than ten years of hands-on professional experience, at the forefront of IT support, executing a broad range of IT tasks for an extensive array of customers. Every Progent support professional shares a refined set of best practices which are combined into shared best practices standards that Progent teaches its consulting staff. This means that you get not only expert technical capability, but also a consultant with proven approaches for using computer knowledge to repair real-world network problems quickly.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent’s team of IT consultants is made up of some the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than 10 years of professional background per consultant, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts bring a proven set of methodologies for resolving network problems, managing projects, and delivering professional services. The technical scope of Progent's engineering team enables Progent to provide your company a consulting expert with tested ability and an efficient approach for delivering fast and affordable network solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent utilizes a group technique to resolving the most difficult network issues. By leveraging hundreds of man-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified professionals, Progent can rapidly and efficiently solve even the most challenging issues. Consulting with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of complex implementation and configuration projects every year offers Progent a unique perspective on which approaches work and which ones do not. Complex software interactions are a minefield for even the most skilled consultants unless they bring a long and diverse history in real-world experience with a wide range of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has incorporated the aggregate background of its top consulting personnel to create an in-house, corporate-wide collection of methodologies designed to promote fast, affordable resolutions of information technology problems and to measure and optimize customer satisfaction. These practices include a strong emphasis on client communication and support recording. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of innovative network integration, corporate management, marketing, and administration. Progent's company-wide best practices are significantly driven by Mr. Kent's background developing challenging technical solutions while working as a network architect, software developer, project manager, deployment professional and troubleshooter.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent makes sure that staff consultants undergo continued technical and best-practices education that includes valuable information and procedures for new product integration that have been gleaned from the practice of hundreds of thousands of technical experts worldwide. This promotes continually more efficient provision of support to Progent's clients.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system offers comprehensive documentation for all provided support. Each authorized Progent team consultant has full access to all the specifics of support provided by any engineer to each customer. This history of problems and solutions, as well as false alarms and missteps, is organized as an easily accessible in-house information store that enables Progent's consultants to share their experiences corporate-wide to ensure that the general efficiency of Progent's support grows over time. This database also eliminates your reliance on a single engineer by allowing one Progent expert to take up where another stopped while saving hours spent getting up to speed on your network environment. Another advantage of Progent's support reporting system is that your business can more easily take on IT management duties in house if it appears cost-effective to do so, or you can move to a different consulting firm if you become dissatisfied with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger initiatives, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) methodology for providing support. MSF separates projects into distinct and rational phases that minimize the risk of a project getting out of control. Each step builds a solid base for the success of later phases. Design and deployment issues are identified at the start of the project continuum so difficulties can be pi pointed and resolved before client producivity is impacted. This also keeps costs from going through the roof because of unforeseen crises during production roll outs. All project components are recorded to create a comprehensive database of consulting services provided and to assist in continuing network support.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As authorized support associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's most extensive technical databases and resources. Some of the most helpful support databases accessible by Progent's engineers are the operational leading practices built into the assorted Management Packs created by Microsoft and other vendors for use in conjunction with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the automated server monitoring software that is the basis of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs contain specially designed scripted rules that will react to events, thresholds, and alerts monitored by Microsoft Operations Manager. MPs can also give expert suggestions on how to deal with specific problems by programmatically extracting relevant technical notes from the extensive Microsoft support database.