Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified experts average longer than a decade of hands-on industry background, at the forefront of network support, performing a wide range of IT tasks for an extensive array of businesses. Every Progent support professional shares a refined collection of best practices that are combined into company-wide best practices standards that Progent instills in its support personnel. This ensures that you get not only world-class IT skills, but also a consultant with field-tested approaches for using technical knowledge to resolve real-world IT problems efficiently.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

  • Individual Professionals
    Progent’s team of IT consultants is made up of some the most experienced Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. Averaging more than a decade of professional experience per engineer, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts offer a proven set of methods for resolving technical problems, managing projects, and delivering consulting support. The technical scope of Progent's engineering staff allows Progent to provide your company a consulting expert with task-relevant skills and an efficient technique for finding quick and inexpensive network solutions.

  • Reliance on Teamwork
    When appropriate, Progent relies on a group approach to resolving the most difficult network problems. By aggregating hundreds of person-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier experts, Progent can rapidly and efficiently solve even the most challenging problems. Working with hundreds of customers and performing thousands of complex deployment and configuration projects every year gives Progent a unique perspective on which techiques succeed and which don't. Subtle software compatibility issues are a minefield for even the most talented consultants unless they bring a long and diverse history in real-world experience with a broad variety of technologies.

  • Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
    Progent has used the combined background of its top engineering staff to develop an internal, corporate-wide collection of leading practices designed to promote fast, cost-effective resolutions of technical issues and to track and optimize customer satisfaction. These methodologies include a powerful emphasis on customer communication and services documentation. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of innovative network consulting, corporate management, sales and marketing, and operations. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are significantly driven by Mr. Kent's experiences creating challenging technical solutions while acting as a system architect, program developer, project manager, deployment expert and troubleshooter.

  • Continuing Professional Education
    As an authorized partner with Microsoft, Progent makes sure that in-house engineers participate in continued technical and best-practices training that contains valuable information and methods for technology integration that have been developed from the experience of thousands of computer experts worldwide. This results in continually more efficient delivery of services to Progent's clients.

  • Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
    Progent's advanced service documentation system provides comprehensive documentation for all delivered support. Every authorized Progent staff consultant has full availability of the details of support provided by any consultant to every client. This database of issues and resolutions, as well as false alarms and missteps, is arranged as an easily accessible internal database that allows Progent's support professionals to communicate their experiences corporate-wide to ensure that the overall effectiveness of Progent's support grows continuously. This database also reduces your reliance on an individual consultant by allowing one Progent expert to take up where another stopped while minimizing time wasting getting familiar with your network environment. Another advantage of Progent's service reporting system is that your business can more smoothly take on IT management services in house if it appears cost-effective to do so, or you can move to a different IT outsourcing firm if you grow dissatisfied with Progent's service.

  • Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
    For major initiatives, Progent consultants use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for delivering support. Microsoft Solutions Framework breaks down major initiatives into distinct and manageable phases that reduce the risk of a project falling off track. Every phase creates a strong foundation for the completion of later phases. Design and deployment requirements are defined at the start of the project cycle so difficulties can be anticipated and resolved before customer producivity is impacted. This also keeps costs from skyrocketing because of unexpected crises during production deployment. All phases are recorded to build a comprehensive description of consulting services delivered and to assist in ongoing network maintenance.

  • Access to External Support Databases
    As certified support associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the industry's most extensive technical databases and resources. Some of the most helpful support databases available to Progent's engineers are the industry best practices incorporated into the assorted Management Packs published by Microsoft and third parties for use in conjunction with Microsoft Operations Manager, the automated server monitoring platform that is the basis of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs (MPs) contain specially designed processing rules that will react to events, performance margins, and warnings tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Management Packs can also provide expert suggestions on how to deal with specific issues by programmatically extracting relevant articles from the extensive Microsoft support database.
To get in touch with Progent for mid-size business network support, call 1-800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.