Computer Help for Mid-size Businesses

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent's staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified consultants average longer than ten years of real-world professional background, at the forefront of IT support, performing a wide range of IT tasks for an extensive mix of clients. Each Progent consultant shares a proven set of leading practices which are combined into shared best practices training that Progent teaches its consulting team. This means that you get not only expert IT skills, but also a consultant with field-tested approaches for applying technical knowledge to repair real-world network problems efficiently.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent's team of IT consultants is composed of among the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than a decade of professional background per consultant, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts bring a tested set of methodologies for solving technical issues, managing projects, and providing consulting 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 finding fast and affordable IT solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent utilizes a group technique to solving the most difficult technical problems. By leveraging hundreds of person-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts, Progent can rapidly and cost-effectively solve even the most vexing issues. Working with hundreds of clients and completing thousands of complex deployment and configuration projects every year offers Progent a unique view on which techiques succeed and which ones do not. Subtle software interactions are a potential trap for even the most skilled consultants unless they have a long and diverse history in real-world work with a broad variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has used the combined experience of its senior engineering staff to develop an internal, company-wide collection of methodologies designed to promote timely, affordable solutions of information technology issues and to measure and optimize customer satisfaction. These methodologies include a strong emphasis on customer communication and support documentation. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of innovative network integration, corporate management, marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are significantly driven by Mr. Kent's experiences developing challenging technical solutions while working as a system designer, program developer, project manager, deployment expert and diagnostic engineer.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As an authorized partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent ensures that staff consultants undergo continued product and methodology education that contains important information and procedures for technology adoption that have been developed from the experience of thousands of computer professionals around the world. This results in increasingly efficient delivery of services to Progent's clients.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system provides comprehensive records for all provided services. Every Progent team member has complete access to all the specifics of support provided by any consultant to every customer. This database of issues and resolutions, plus false alarms and missteps, is organized as readily accessible internal information store that enables Progent's consultants to share their knowledge corporate-wide so that the overall effectiveness of Progent's consulting services grows continuously. This support history also reduces your dependence on an individual engineer by allowing any Progent expert to take up where another stopped while minimizing hours wasting getting up to speed on your information system environment. An additional advantage of Progent's support reporting database is that your business can more smoothly handle network management duties internally if it becomes economical to do so, or you can move to another consulting firm if you become unhappy with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major projects, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) methodology for providing service. MSF separates projects into discrete and rational components that reduce the risk of a project getting out of control. Each phase builds a solid base for the success of following phases. Design and deployment issues are defined early in the project cycle so problems can be pi pointed and dealt with before customer producivity is disrupted. This also keeps costs from going through the roof because of unexpected crises during large scale roll outs. All phases are recorded to build a detailed database of consulting services delivered and to assist in ongoing system support.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified consulting associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the industry's largest information technology databases and resources. Some of the most powerful support knowledge bases accessible by 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 automated network monitoring platform used as the foundation of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs consist of specially built scripted rules that can react to events, thresholds, and alerts tracked by Microsoft Operations Manager. Management Packs can also give valuable suggestions on how to handle specific problems by programmatically extracting appropriate articles from the extensive Microsoft Knowledge Base.