Progent Managed Services

Progent's Shared Help Desk Service
Progent's Shared Service Desk is intended for businesses with 50 to 500 users and permits your information technology group to divide activity for Service Desk support seamlessly between your in-house support resources and Progent's nationwide roster of IT service engineers and subject matter experts (SMEs). Progent's Co-managed Service Desk is a collaborative IT support solution based on ConnectWise Manage, the industry-leading Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool for managing IT service calls, generating tickets, assigning responsibility, tracking status, and producing management analytics. The price for Level 1 IT support for Progent's Shared Help Desk service is typically less than $18 per user per month.

Progent's Shared Help Desk Service offers a seamless supplement to your core support team. End user interaction with the Help Desk, provision of support, escalation, trouble ticket generation and updates, performance metrics, and maintenance of the service database are cohesive regardless of whether issues are resolved by your internal support organization, by Progent's team, or a mix of the two. All client support calls are triaged as Level 1, 2 or 3 issues. Progent takes responsibility for whatever service levels you specify (usually Level 1 and Level 3). Initial service calls are assigned to your internal network support group or to Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC), based on your preferences. Level 2 or 3 tickets can be promoted to Progent's Experts Team of subject matter experts (SMEs). The assignment activity is seamless for your users. Your business has unrestricted versatility to expand or reduce your share of technical support work as circumstances demand. Progent takes care of startup installation and onboarding of the professional services automation software as well as workflow documentation, testing and training.

Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC)
Progent's Technical Response Center has been providing remote technical support for over twenty years and serves active clients in each state in the country (refer to Progent's customer testimonials.) The Technical Response Center maintains the team of veteran desktop technicians who can handle Level 1 tickets, which represent the majority of Help Desk service requests. The Technical Response Center, like Progent's Experts Team, uses the ConnectWise Manage professional services automation platform to streamline ticketing, status tracking, responsibility delegation, problem escalation and management reporting. This prevents tickets from being ignored and offers users clear visibility of all services delivered. The TRC is committed to 90% in-person answer performance and allows Progent's Co-managed Help Desk program to offer a 60-minute service-level agreement. Service hours are 5am to 7pm PST on normal work days. Extended support hours and on-premises service are available at extra cost. For more details about Progent's Technical Response Center, see Progent's Technical Response Center Customer Commitment.

Definition of Service Levels
Progent provides three levels of remote IT help, which are equivalent to industry-recognized Tier 1 to Tier 3 support. You can select which service levels will be provided wholly or shared by Progent and your internal service group. The size and knowledge of Progent's roster of subject matter experts allows rapid and effective ticket escalation and makes it possible to rely on Progent as a one-stop source for the majority of support issues at any Tier. In addition, Progent's practice of knowledge transfer permits key support problems to migrate from higher to lower levels as resolution processes become recorded and standardized so they can be handled by less skilled and less expensive service staff.

Service levels are described as:

• Level 1 Support: Categorizes Service Desk calls and delivers basic IT help and debugging, such as password resets, printer configurations, break/fix procedures, ticket assignment and escalation to Level 2 and Level 3 support. A Level 1 tech gathers and analyzes information about the user's issue and determines the best way to resolve the problem. Level 1 service may also provide assistance for familiar Level 2 or 3 problems where mitigation solutions have previously been documented.
• Level 2 Support: Generally handles break/fix, configuration issues, debugging, application or OS installations, and hardware fixes such as in-house fixes or coordinating depot services. Level 2 support involves promoted issues that Level 1 support is not equipped to resolve. Level 2 service will sometimes migrate to Level 3, based on the problem and the way the Service Desk operates.
• Level 3 Support: Troubleshooting, configuration, database administration, and fixes or updates for OS and applications servers, hybrid networks, email, file shares, and various integration problems. Besides possessing the ability to find fixes to new issues, a Level 3 engineer typically has the most real-world experience.

This sample deployment of Progent's Co-managed Help Desk Service has a 4-phase trouble ticket lifecycle:

1. Your employees enter service requests via the online support, a dedicated telephone number, or simply by sending an email to a designated mailbox. This immediately launches an open request in the trouble ticket system.
2. Progent's Technical Response Center receives the open request and decides whether it will be handles or escalated to your internal Service Desk.
3. Your Service Desk gets the escalated trouble ticket request and decides the proper means to resolve the issue. If necessary, your Help Desk can in turn send the trouble ticket request back to Progent for assignment to Progent's Experts Team.
4. Progent receives the updated ticket request, identifies the best suited subject matter exert from the Experts Team, and tasks the designated subject matter exert to co-operate with your support team until the problem is solved or closed.

Key Features of Progent's Service Desk
Important aspects of Progent's Shared Call Desk program include:

• Pooled desktop support from Progent's Technical Response Center team
• Desktop remote support provided 5 days a week, 5am-7pm Pacific Time, One-hour SLA
• Special per-hour rate with per-minute granularity for Level 1 desktop support for users
• Typical price of Level 1 service is approximately $18 montly per user
• Level 2 and Level 3 help from Progent subject matter expert provided as an option at Progent's normal consulting rates
• De-escalation permits issues that at first call for Level 2 or 3 expertise to migrate to a lower, less expensive Tier after procedures are documented
• StreamlineIT includes a full implementation of ConnectWise Manage with multi-tenant security

• Offered only in USA and territories
• One-time setup fee dependent on complexity of the solution
• Starting the first day, you are assigned by Progent a Technical Resource Center (TRC) Coordinator and a TRC Service Lead to resource, appoint and communicate with your service group and your users. Progent's TRC Service Lead will work closely with you to create a What Goes Where document to help transparently escalate tickets to your service group or de-escalate back to Progent's support engineers.
• Live Answer of incoming support calls to Progent Technical Response Center with a target of 90% Live Answer of all calls
• After determining if server or networking support is required, some calls will be passed to Level 2 or Level 3 support
• All assistance requiring Level 2 or 3 expertise will be handled by a Progent expert pending client authorization
• 1 hour SLA for Level 1 desktop support in most cases
• Level 1 Service is for your client users and applies to Windows-based computers and Apple devices
• Progent Level 2 or Level 3 support will be charged at standard hourly consulting prices
• Progent will provide personnel - Technical Response Center desktop engineers daily, Level 2 and Level 3 as required
• Progent will dedicate a phone number and email mailbox for incoming support calls
• Free Remote Control app with screen sharing for efficient IT support
• Free ProSight IT Asset Management solution for network documentation management
• All Level 1 online support is billed at a special desktop hourly rate with per-minute granularity
• All Level 1 service will be performed online, no onsite work included
• All onsite work is invoiced at regular hourly consulting rates
• All onsite support will have an added fixed fee plus any specific travel costs
• All travel cost projections will be disclosed and require customer agreement before support services or travel will be performed
• Contracted projects and separate Statements of Work will include their individual estimates and fees stipulated and will be undertaken only following approval by customer

Initial Steps

• Build your custom Service Desk experience, setting up your internal support group, locations, and client information
• Progent will work with your company's service team to analyze current incoming service calls
• Set up your inbound help request system to incorporate a mailbox, software agents, and a dedicated phone number

• Progent delivers ticket management education for your company's service group
• Work together to define core workflow and ticket escalation processes
• Integrate all your staff and assets that will provide support services
• Develop the announcement message and selling of the new Help Desk solution
• Designate a specific location or small groups to onboard initially
• Bring additional users into the system at a workable pace

• Review reports and system configuration for proper data and processes
• Create additional reports or fields needed to improve the identification or tracking of common issues
• Identify key information that might enable a better resolution percentage for Level 1 service requests

• All users have been exposed to the support system and can access it
• All required client and hardware data is entered into the support system
• You are able to transfer and administer tickets transparently between your internal support group and Progent
• You can monitor daily, weekly and monthly support performance

• Keep complete control over your IT service requests: you choose what trouble tickets are forwarded to Progent's service desk or taken care of by your in-house service staff.
• Quick access to additional IT support professionals when and if you require them: Progent's professional services automation (PSA) software automatically routes in-house trouble tickets or permits you manually forward to Progent's Technical Response Center.
• Efficiency: Progent's IT support experts will review your current incoming service requests and propose missing data that would promote a higher resolution rate for typical Level 1 issues. Progent's Call Desk experts can also assist you with tag creation to expedite problem resolution.
• Transparency: Progent's Co-managed Service Desk acts as a seamless supplement to your internal support desk with unified ticketing and documentation so no ticket falls through the seams.
• Happy workers: Users have the ability to follow the progress of their IT service calls quickly and easily.
• Management analytics: You benefit from the metrics, responsibility assignments, and performance reporting of an advanced PSA platform to assist your organization to create a custom-designed Call Center experience that delivers maximum business value.
• Focus on your core business issues, not IT support requests and unhappy workers: Your network management personnel avoid being saddled with trying to manage day-to-day service calls.

Check Out Progent's White Paper: Is Co-managed IT a Good Idea?
Although maintaining a fully-staffed in-house network support group can be a burden from the cost perspective, plenty of organizations prefer that strategy since it offers greater flexibility with their network management. Yet did you know that your business can still leverage the advantages of a managed services firm using the co-managed network support strategy. The shared model allows you to keep in charge of your system infrastructure while augmenting your local IT services team easily and affordably.

To learn more, see our white paper: Is co-managed IT a good idea? (PDF - 632 KB).

Download Progent's Co-managed Service Desk Datasheet
To download a single-page datasheet in PDF format describing Progent's Co-managed Help Desk, click:
Progent's Shared Service Desk Datasheet. (PDF - 108 KB)

Related Services
Progent has packaged the ProSight suite of remote monitoring and management (RMM) services to automate critical activities associated with network management, security and maintenance. Any of these RMM services can be used with Progent's Shared Help Desk service by deploying agent software on machines to be monitored and managed. Notifications generated by these software agents can be forwarded automatically to Progent's Technical Response Center, processed via the trouble ticket and monitoring system, and triaged for Level 1, 2 or 3 treatment.

Examples of ProSight RMM packages include:

• ProSight Email Guard: Email Content Filtering, Spam Blocking and Data Leakage Defense:
  ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam filtering and email encryption service that incorporates the infrastructure of top information security companies to provide web-based management and comprehensive protection for your email traffic. The powerful architecture of Email Guard combines cloud-based filtering with an on-premises security gateway appliance to offer advanced defense against spam, viruses, Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs), and other email-based threats. Email Guard's Cloud Protection Layer acts as a preliminary barricade and keeps the vast majority of threats from reaching your security perimeter. This reduces your vulnerability to inbound threats and saves network bandwidth and storage space. Email Guard's onsite security gateway appliance provides a further layer of inspection for incoming email. For outbound email, the local security gateway provides AV and anti-spam protection, protection against data leaks, and email encryption. The onsite security gateway can also help Microsoft Exchange Server to track and safeguard internal email that originates and ends inside your corporate firewall. For more details, visit Email Guard spam filtering and data leakage protection.

• ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM): AI-based Threat Analysis and Ransomware Protection:
  Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring is an endpoint protection (EPP) service that utilizes next generation behavior-based analysis tools from SentinelOne to defend physical and virtual endpoint devices against modern malware attacks like ransomware and file-less exploits, which easily get by traditional signature-matching anti-virus tools. ProSight Active Security Monitoring protects local and cloud resources and provides a unified platform to address the complete threat progression including filtering, identification, mitigation, cleanup, and post-attack forensics. Top capabilities include single-click rollback with Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and real-time system-wide immunization against new threats. Progent is a SentinelOne Partner, dealer, and integrator. Read more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) next-generation endpoint protection and ransomware recovery with SentinelOne technology.

• ProSight Data Protection Services: Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery:
  Progent has partnered with advanced backup product companies to produce ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS), a selection of offerings that provide backup-as-a-service (BaaS). All ProSight DPS services automate and monitor your backup processes and enable transparent backup and rapid recovery of vital files/folders, apps, images, and VMs. ProSight DPS lets your business recover from data loss resulting from hardware breakdown, natural calamities, fire, malware such as ransomware, human mistakes, ill-intentioned employees, or application glitches. Managed services in the ProSight DPS selection include ProSight DPS Altaro VM Backup, ProSight 365 Total Backup (formerly Altaro Office 365 Backup), ProSight ECHO Backup using Barracuda purpose-built storage, and ProSight DPS MSP360 Cloud and On-prem Backup. Your Progent consultant can assist you to determine which of these managed services are most appropriate for your IT environment.

• Patch Management: Patch Management Services:
  Progent's managed services for software and firmware patch management offer organizations of any size a versatile and cost-effective solution for assessing, validating, scheduling, implementing, and documenting software and firmware updates to your dynamic information network. In addition to maximizing the security and functionality of your IT network, Progent's patch management services allow your IT staff to focus on line-of-business projects and activities that derive the highest business value from your network. Find out more about Progent's patch management support services.

• ProSight Duo Multi-Factor Authentication: Access Security, Endpoint Remediation, and Protected Single Sign-on:
  Progent's Duo MFA service plans incorporate Cisco's Duo technology to defend against password theft through the use of two-factor authentication. Duo enables single-tap identity confirmation with iOS, Android, and other out-of-band devices. With Duo 2FA, when you sign into a secured application and give your password you are asked to confirm your identity on a unit that only you have and that uses a different ("out-of-band") network channel. A wide selection of out-of-band devices can be used for this added form of authentication including an iPhone or Android or wearable, a hardware token, a landline telephone, etc. You can register several validation devices. To find out more about ProSight Duo two-factor identity validation services, visit Cisco Duo MFA two-factor authentication services for access security.