Computer Network Help for Mid-size Companies

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Certified consultants average more than ten years of hands-on industry background, in the trenches of IT support, executing a broad range of IT tasks for an extensive array of customers. Every Progent consultant shares a refined set of leading practices that are incorporated into shared best practices standards that Progent teaches its support personnel. This ensures that you get not only world-class IT skills, but also a support engineer with proven approaches for applying technical knowledge to resolve real-world network problems efficiently.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent’s staff of network consultants is made up of among the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than a decade of real-world experience per engineer, Progent's Microsoft Premier experts bring a tested set of methodologies for resolving network issues, planning projects, and providing professional support. The technical scope of Progent's engineering staff allows Progent to offer your company a consulting expert with task-relevant ability and an effective technique for delivering fast and affordable IT solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent utilizes a group approach to resolving the most stubborn technical problems. By aggregating hundreds of person-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts, Progent can quickly and cost-effectively solve even the most vexing problems. Working with hundreds of clients and performing thousands of complex implementation and integration jobs annually offers Progent a unique view on which techiques work and which ones do not. Subtle software interactions are a minefield for even the most skilled consultants unless they have a long and diverse background in real-world experience with a wide variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has incorporated the combined experience of its senior engineering personnel to create an in-house, company-wide collection of leading practices designed to ensure timely, cost-effective resolutions of technical problems and to measure and maximize customer approval. These practices include a strong emphasis on client communication and services recording. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of successful technology integration, business management, marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are strongly influenced by Mr. Kent's background creating complex information technology solutions while acting as a network architect, program developer, project manager, deployment professional and troubleshooter.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent ensures that staff consultants participate in ongoing product and best-practices education that includes valuable information and methods for new product integration that have been developed from the practice of hundreds of thousands of technical experts worldwide. This promotes continually more effective provision of services to Progent's customers.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system provides comprehensive records for all provided support. Each Progent staff member has complete availability of the specifics of support delivered by any engineer to every customer. This database of issues and resolutions, plus false alarms and miscues, is organized as an easily accessible in-house database that allows Progent's consultants to communicate their experiences corporate-wide to ensure that the general effectiveness of Progent's consulting services expands over time. This support history also reduces your reliance on an individual engineer by allowing one Progent consultant to take up where another left off while saving hours spent getting up to speed on your information system environment. An additional benefit of Progent's service documentation system is that your company can more smoothly take on IT support services internally if it becomes cost-effective to do so, or you can move to another consulting company if you become dissatisfied with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major initiatives, Progent consultants use the Microsoft Solutions Framework model for delivering service. Microsoft Solutions Framework divides major initiatives into distinct and rational components that reduce the chance of a project getting off track. Every step creates a strong base for the success of following phases. Design and deployment issues are identified early in the project continuum so difficulties can be pi pointed and resolved before client producivity is impacted. This also prevents expenses from going through the roof due to unexpected problems during major 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 authorized consulting associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the industry's most extensive technical databases and resource pool. Some of the most helpful support databases available to Progent's consultants are the industry best practices built into the various Management Packs published by Microsoft and other vendors for use with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the automated server monitoring software used as the foundation of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs (MPs) consist of custom built processing rules that can respond to events, performance margins, and warnings monitored by Microsoft Operations Manager. MPs can also give valuable suggestions on how to deal with certain problems by automatically extracting appropriate articles from the extensive Microsoft Knowledge Base.