Computer Support for Midsize Companies

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified experts average longer than ten years of real-world industry background, at the front lines of IT support, performing a broad variety of IT tasks for an extensive array of businesses. Each Progent support professional shares a refined set of best practices which are incorporated into shared best practices training that Progent teaches its support staff. This ensures that you get not just world-class IT capability, but also a support engineer with proven approaches for using technical knowledge to solve real-world network problems efficiently.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent’s staff of IT consultants is made up of some the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. Averaging more than a decade of real-world background per engineer, Progent's Microsoft Certified experts bring a tested set of methodologies for solving network problems, managing projects, and delivering consulting services. The technical depth of Progent's support team enables Progent to provide your business a consultant with tested skills and an effective approach for delivering fast and affordable IT solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When required, Progent utilizes a team approach to solving the most difficult network issues. By leveraging hundreds of person-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts, Progent can rapidly and efficiently solve even the most vexing problems. Working with hundreds of clients and completing thousands of complex deployment and integration jobs every year gives Progent a unique view on which techiques succeed and which ones do not. Subtle software interactions are a minefield for even the most talented consultants unless they have a long and diverse history in real-world experience with a broad variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has incorporated the aggregate background of its top engineering personnel to create an in-house, company-wide collection of best practices designed to promote fast, cost-effective resolutions of technical issues and to track and maximize client satisfaction. These methodologies include a powerful emphasis on customer communication and services documentation. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of innovative technology consulting, corporate management, marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are significantly influenced by Mr. Kent's experiences creating complex information technology solutions while working as a system designer, program developer, task manager, implementation professional and diagnostic engineer.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As an authorized partner with Microsoft, Progent ensures that in-house consultants undergo continued product and methodology training that includes important lessons and procedures for new product adoption that have been developed from the practice of hundreds of thousands of computer professionals worldwide. This promotes increasingly efficient provision of support to Progent's clients.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system offers detailed documentation for all delivered services. Every authorized Progent staff member has complete availability of the specifics of support provided by any consultant to every customer. This history of issues and resolutions, as well as false alarms and miscues, is organized as an easily searchable internal database that allows Progent's consultants to communicate their knowledge company-wide so that the overall effectiveness of Progent's support grows over time. This support history also reduces your dependence on an individual engineer by allowing any Progent expert to take up where another left off while saving hours spent getting ramped up on your information system environment. Another benefit of Progent's service reporting database is that your business can more easily take on IT management duties internally if it becomes cost-effective to do so, or you can move to a different consulting firm if you become unhappy with Progent's support.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger projects, Progent consultants follow the Microsoft Solutions Framework model for delivering service. MSF separates projects into discrete and manageable components that reduce the chance of a project getting off track. Each phase builds a solid base for the completion of following phases. Design and deployment issues are identified early in the project cycle so problems can be anticipated and resolved before customer producivity is disrupted. In addition, this prevents costs from spinning out of control due to unforeseen crises during large scale roll outs. All project components are documented to build a comprehensive database of consulting services provided and to assist in continuing system maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As authorized consulting associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the world's most extensive information technology databases and resource pool. Some of the most helpful support knowledge bases available to Progent's consultants are the industry best practices incorporated into the various Management Packs created by Microsoft and third parties to be used with Microsoft Operations Manager, the proactive network monitoring platform used as the foundation of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs contain custom designed processing rules that can react 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 specific problems by programmatically extracting relevant articles from the extensive Microsoft Knowledge Base.