Computer Outsourcing for Medium-size Companies

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts average more than a decade of real-world industry experience, at the forefront of network support, executing a wide variety of technical projects for an extensive mix of customers. Every Progent support professional shares a refined set of best practices that are combined into company-wide best practices training that Progent instills in its support team. This ensures that you get not just world-class IT skills, but also a support engineer with field-tested approaches for applying technical knowledge to solve actual network 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 experienced Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. With more than 10 years of professional background for each consultant, Progent's Microsoft Certified experts bring a proven set of methodologies for solving network issues, planning projects, and delivering consulting support. The technical depth of Progent's engineering team enables Progent to offer your business a consulting expert with task-relevant skills and an effective approach for finding fast and affordable IT solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When required, Progent relies on a group approach to resolving the most stubborn technical problems. By leveraging hundreds of man-years of experience from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified professionals, Progent can rapidly and efficiently solve even the most vexing problems. Working with hundreds of customers and performing thousands of sophisticated deployment and configuration jobs annually gives Progent a unique perspective on which approaches succeed and which don't. Complex software compatibility issues are a minefield for even the most talented engineers unless they have an extensive and diverse history in hands-on experience with a broad variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has used the combined experience of its senior engineering staff to create an in-house, company-wide set of methodologies intended to ensure timely, affordable solutions of technical issues and to measure and maximize customer approval. These methodologies include a strong emphasis on client communication and services documentation. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year track record of successful network consulting, business management, sales and marketing, and operations. Progent's company-wide best practices are significantly driven by Mr. Kent's experiences creating challenging information technology solutions while acting as a network designer, software developer, task manager, deployment expert and diagnostic engineer.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As a certified partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent ensures that in-house engineers participate in continued technical and best-practices training that includes valuable information and methods for new product integration that have been developed from the practice of hundreds of thousands of technical professionals around the world. 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 offers detailed documentation for all delivered services. Each Progent team member has full access to the specifics of support delivered by any engineer to every client. This history of problems and solutions, plus false alarms and miscues, is organized as an easily accessible in-house database that enables Progent's consultants to communicate their experiences company-wide so that the general efficiency of Progent's support grows continuously. This database also eliminates your dependence on an individual engineer by allowing any Progent consultant to take up where another stopped while saving time spent getting familiar with your information system environment. An additional benefit of Progent's service reporting system is that your business can more easily handle IT management duties in house if it becomes economical to do so, or you can move to a different IT outsourcing firm if you grow unhappy with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For larger initiatives, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) model for delivering service. Microsoft Solutions Framework divides projects into distinct and manageable components that reduce the chance of a project getting out of control. Every step creates a solid foundation for the completion of following phases. Planning and integration issues are defined at the start of the project cycle so difficulties can be pi pointed and dealt with before customer workflow is disrupted. This also prevents expenses from skyrocketing due to unexpected problems during production roll outs. All project components are documented to create a detailed description of consulting services delivered and to help in ongoing system support.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified support partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the industry's largest technical databases and resources. Among the most helpful technical knowledge bases available to Progent's consultants are the operational leading practices built into the assorted Management Packs published by Microsoft and third parties to be used with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the proactive server monitoring platform used as the basis of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs (MPs) contain specially built scripted rules that can react to events, thresholds, and warnings monitored by Microsoft Operations Manager. Management Packs can also provide valuable advice on how to handle specific problems by automatically finding appropriate articles from the vast Microsoft support database.