Computer Support for Medium-size Businesses

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier consultants average more than a decade of hands-on industry background, at the forefront of IT service, performing a broad range of technical projects for an extensive mix of businesses. Each Progent support professional shares a refined collection of best practices which are combined into shared best practices standards that Progent instills in its consulting personnel. This ensures that you get not just expert technical help, but also a consultant with field-tested methods for applying computer knowledge to solve actual network problems quickly.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent’s staff of network engineers is made up of among the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than a decade of professional experience per consultant, Progent's Microsoft Premier experts offer a tested set of methodologies for solving technical problems, planning projects, and providing professional services. The technical depth of Progent's engineering staff allows Progent to provide your company a consultant with task-relevant skills and an efficient technique for finding fast and affordable IT solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent relies on a team approach to solving the most stubborn network issues. By aggregating hundreds of man-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier professionals, Progent can rapidly and cost-effectively solve even the most challenging issues. Consulting with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of sophisticated implementation and integration projects annually offers Progent a special perspective on which approaches succeed and which don't. Complex software interactions are a minefield for even the most skilled engineers unless they have an extensive and diverse history in hands-on experience with a wide variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has used the combined background of its top engineering personnel to develop an internal, company-wide set of methodologies designed to ensure fast, cost-effective solutions of technical problems and to measure and maximize customer approval. These practices include a strong focus on client communication and support recording. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of innovative network consulting, corporate management, sales and marketing, and administration. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are strongly influenced by Mr. Kent's experiences developing challenging information technology solutions while working as a network designer, program developer, task manager, deployment professional and diagnostic engineer.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As an authorized partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent ensures that staff engineers participate in continued product and best-practices training that includes valuable information and procedures for new product adoption that have been developed from the practice of thousands of computer experts worldwide. This promotes increasingly effective provision of services to Progent's clients.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system offers comprehensive records for all provided services. Every Progent team member has full access to all the specifics of services delivered by any consultant to every client. This record of problems and resolutions, plus false alarms and missteps, is arranged as readily searchable in-house information store that enables Progent's consultants to share their experiences company-wide so that the overall effectiveness of Progent's support grows over time. This support history also reduces your dependence on a single consultant by making it possible for any Progent consultant to take up where another stopped while minimizing time wasting getting up to speed on your information system environment. An additional benefit of Progent's support reporting system is that your company can more easily handle network support services internally if it becomes cost-effective to do so, or you can migrate to another consulting firm if you become unhappy with Progent's support.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger initiatives, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework model for delivering service. MSF breaks down major initiatives into distinct and manageable components that minimize the risk of a project getting off track. Every phase creates a strong foundation for the success of later phases. Planning and integration issues are identified at the start of the project continuum so difficulties can be pi pointed and dealt with before customer producivity is disrupted. In addition, this keeps costs from going through the roof due to unexpected crises during major deployment. All project components are recorded to build a detailed database of consulting services delivered and to help in ongoing network maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified support partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the world's largest technical knowledge bases and resources. Among the most helpful technical databases accessible by Progent's engineers are the operational leading 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 processing rules that can react to events, thresholds, and alerts monitored by Microsoft Operations Manager. Management Packs can also provide expert advice on how to handle certain problems by programmatically finding appropriate articles from the vast Microsoft support database.