Network Support for Midsize Companies

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified consultants average more than ten years of real-world industry experience, in the trenches of network service, executing a broad variety of technical tasks for an extensive array of clients. Each Progent consultant shares a proven set of leading practices that are combined into company-wide best practices standards that Progent instills in its support staff. This guarantees that you get not just world-class technical help, but also a support engineer with proven methods for using technical knowledge to solve actual IT problems rapidly.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent’s staff of network engineers is made up of some the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. Averaging more than 10 years of real-world experience for each consultant, Progent's Microsoft Certified experts offer a proven set of methods for resolving network problems, planning projects, and providing professional support. The technical scope of Progent's engineering team allows Progent to provide your business a consultant with task-relevant ability and an effective technique for finding fast and inexpensive IT solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent utilizes a group technique to solving the most stubborn network issues. By aggregating hundreds of man-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified professionals, Progent can quickly and efficiently handle even the most vexing problems. Working with hundreds of clients and completing thousands of sophisticated implementation and configuration jobs annually offers Progent a special perspective on which techiques succeed and which ones do not. Complex software interactions are a minefield for even the most skilled engineers unless they bring an extensive and diverse background in real-world work with a broad range of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has used the combined background of its senior engineering staff to create an in-house, company-wide set of best practices designed to ensure fast, affordable solutions of information technology problems and to measure and optimize client satisfaction. These practices include a powerful focus on client communication and services documentation. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of innovative network integration, corporate management, marketing, and operations. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are strongly influenced by Mr. Kent's experiences developing complex technical solutions while acting as a network designer, program developer, project manager, implementation expert and diagnostic engineer.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent makes sure that in-house engineers participate in continued product and best-practices education that contains important information and methods for new product adoption that have been developed from the practice of hundreds of thousands of technical professionals around the world. 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 offers detailed documentation for all provided support. Each authorized Progent staff consultant has complete availability of all the details of services provided by any consultant to each client. This record of issues and resolutions, plus false alarms and missteps, is organized as an easily searchable in-house database that enables Progent's consultants to communicate their knowledge company-wide so that the general effectiveness of Progent's support expands over time. This database also reduces your reliance on an individual engineer by making it possible for any Progent consultant to take up where another stopped while saving hours wasting getting up to speed on your information system setup. An additional benefit of Progent's support reporting system is that your business can more easily handle IT support services internally if it becomes economical to do so, or you can move to a different IT outsourcing company if you grow unhappy with Progent's support.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major initiatives, Progent consultants use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for delivering service. Microsoft Solutions Framework breaks down major initiatives into distinct and rational phases that reduce the risk of a project getting out of control. Each phase builds a solid base for the completion of later phases. Planning and integration requirements are identified at the start of the project continuum so difficulties can be pi pointed and dealt with before client producivity is impacted. This also prevents costs from skyrocketing because of unexpected problems during major roll outs. All phases are documented to create a detailed database of consulting services provided and to assist in ongoing network maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified support partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's most extensive information technology knowledge bases and resources. Among the most powerful support knowledge bases accessible by Progent's consultants are the industry leading practices built into the various Management Packs published by Microsoft and third parties 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) consist of specially designed scripted rules that can respond to events, thresholds, and alerts monitored by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Management Packs can also give valuable suggestions on how to deal with certain issues by automatically finding relevant articles from the vast Microsoft support database.