Network Outsourcing for Medium-size Businesses

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent’s staff of Microsoft and Cisco Premier consultants average longer than ten years of real-world industry background, at the forefront of IT service, performing a wide range of IT projects for a large mix of clients. Every Progent support professional shares a refined set of leading practices that are combined into company-wide best practices standards that Progent instills in its support team. This means that you get not just expert IT help, but also a support engineer with field-tested methods for using computer knowledge to repair real-world IT problems efficiently.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent’s team of network engineers is made up of some the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco experts in the industry. Averaging more than a decade of real-world background for each consultant, Progent's Microsoft Premier experts bring a proven set of methods for resolving network problems, managing projects, and delivering professional support. The technical scope of Progent's support team allows Progent to provide your company a consulting expert with tested skills and an efficient approach for finding fast and inexpensive IT solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent relies on a team technique to resolving the most stubborn network issues. By leveraging hundreds of man-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Premier Certified experts, Progent can quickly and efficiently handle even the most vexing problems. Consulting with hundreds of customers and performing thousands of complex deployment and integration jobs annually offers Progent a special perspective on which techiques succeed and which don't. Subtle software compatibility issues are a minefield for even the most skilled consultants unless they have a long and varied background in real-world work with a wide variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has used the combined experience of its senior engineering staff to create an internal, company-wide set of methodologies intended to ensure timely, affordable resolutions of information technology issues and to track and optimize client satisfaction. These practices include a powerful emphasis on client communication and services recording. Progent's Founder and CEO, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of successful technology consulting, corporate management, sales and marketing, and administration. Progent's corporate-wide best practices are significantly influenced by Mr. Kent's experiences creating challenging technical solutions while acting as a system architect, software developer, task manager, implementation professional and troubleshooter.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As an authorized partner with Microsoft and Cisco, Progent makes sure that staff consultants undergo ongoing product and best-practices training that includes valuable lessons and methods for technology adoption that have been developed from the practice of thousands of computer experts around the world. This promotes increasingly effective delivery of services to Progent's customers.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system offers comprehensive records for all provided support. Each authorized Progent team consultant has complete access to the details of services provided by any staff member to every customer. This database of issues and resolutions, plus false alarms and miscues, is organized as readily accessible in-house information store that enables Progent's consultants to share their experiences company-wide so that the general efficiency of Progent's support grows over time. This support history also reduces your reliance on an individual consultant by allowing any Progent expert to take up where another left off while minimizing hours wasting getting up to speed on your information system environment. Another benefit of Progent's support reporting database is that your company can more easily take on network management duties internally if it becomes economical to do so, or you can migrate to another IT outsourcing company if you become dissatisfied with Progent's support.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major initiatives, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework methodology for delivering service. MSF divides projects into discrete and manageable phases that reduce the chance of a project getting out of control. Each step builds a strong base for the success of following phases. Design and deployment requirements are identified at the start of the project cycle so difficulties can be anticipated and dealt with before customer producivity is disrupted. This also keeps expenses from spinning out of control due to unexpected crises during large scale deployment. All project components are recorded to build a detailed database of technical services provided and to help in continuing system support.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified support associates of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has the benefit of the world's largest technical databases and resources. Some of the most helpful technical knowledge bases available to Progent's engineers are the operational best practices built into the assorted Management Packs published by Microsoft and third parties to be used with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the proactive network monitoring software used as the foundation of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs consist of specially designed scripted rules that will respond to events, thresholds, and alerts tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. MPs can also give valuable advice on how to handle specific issues by automatically finding relevant technical notes from the vast Microsoft Knowledge Base.