Computer Outsourcing for Midsize Companies

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent's staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified experts average longer than a decade of hands-on industry background, in the trenches of network service, executing a wide variety of technical tasks for a large array of customers. Every Progent support professional shares a proven set of leading practices which are combined into company-wide best practices standards that Progent instills in its support staff. This ensures that you get not only expert IT help, 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 staff of network consultants is composed of among the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. With more than a decade of professional experience for each engineer, Progent's Microsoft Premier experts offer a tested set of methods for resolving technical problems, managing projects, and providing professional support. The technical scope of Progent's support team allows Progent to offer your business a consultant with task-relevant skills and an effective approach for finding fast and affordable network solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When required, Progent utilizes a group approach to resolving the most stubborn technical problems. By leveraging hundreds of person-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified professionals, Progent can quickly and cost-effectively handle even the most vexing problems. Consulting with hundreds of clients and completing thousands of sophisticated implementation and configuration jobs annually offers Progent a special perspective on which approaches succeed and which ones do not. Complex software compatibility issues are a potential trap for even the most talented engineers unless they bring a long and diverse history in real-world work with a wide variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has used the aggregate experience of its senior engineering personnel to develop an in-house, corporate-wide collection of best practices designed to promote timely, cost-effective solutions of information technology issues and to track and maximize client satisfaction. These methodologies 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, business management, marketing, and administration. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are strongly influenced by Mr. Kent's background developing challenging technical solutions while working as a system designer, software developer, task manager, deployment professional and diagnostic engineer.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent makes sure that staff engineers undergo ongoing product and best-practices training that contains important information and procedures for technology integration that have been gleaned from the practice of hundreds of thousands of computer experts worldwide. This promotes increasingly effective provision of support to Progent's customers.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system offers detailed records for all provided services. Each authorized Progent team consultant has complete access to all the specifics of support provided by any staff member to each customer. This history of issues and solutions, as well as false alarms and miscues, is arranged as an easily accessible internal database that allows Progent's consultants to share their experiences company-wide to ensure that the general effectiveness of Progent's support grows over time. This support history also reduces your reliance on a single engineer by making it possible for one Progent consultant to take up where another left off while saving time spent getting up to speed on your information system setup. Another benefit of Progent's service 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 migrate to a different consulting company if you become unhappy with Progent's support.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger projects, Progent consultants follow the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for providing service. MSF separates projects into discrete and manageable phases that reduce the risk of a project falling out of control. Each phase builds a strong base for the success of later phases. Design and deployment issues are identified early in the project cycle so difficulties can be anticipated and dealt with before customer workflow is impacted. This also keeps costs from skyrocketing because of unforeseen problems during production deployment. All phases are recorded to build a detailed database of technical 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 world's most extensive technical databases and resource pool. Some of the most helpful support databases accessible by Progent's engineers are the industry best practices built into the assorted Management Packs published by Microsoft and other vendors to be used in conjunction with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the proactive network monitoring platform used as the basis of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs contain custom built scripted rules that can react to events, performance margins, and alerts tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. MPs can also provide valuable advice on how to deal with certain problems by automatically extracting appropriate articles from the vast Microsoft support database.