Desktop Support Services

Progent's Shared Service Desk
Progent's Co-managed Help Desk service is intended for organizations with 50 to 500 end users and permits your IT team to divide responsibilities for support services seamlessly between your in-house network support group and Progent's extensive roster of certified IT support engineers and subject matter experts (SMEs). Progent's Shared Service Desk is a collaborative IT service system built around ConnectWise Manage, the industry-leading Professional Services Automation (PSA) platform for administering IT service requests, generating trouble tickets, designating ownership, monitoring progress, and producing management analytics. The price for Level 1 support for Progent's Shared Help Desk service is typically less than $18/user/month.

Progent's Shared Service Desk provides a seamless supplement to your in-house support team. User access to the Help Desk, provision of technical assistance, escalation, ticket generation and tracking, performance metrics, and management of the service database are consistent whether issues are taken care of by your core support staff, by Progent, or a mix of the two. All client service calls are triaged as Level 1, 2 or 3 issues. Progent focuses on the service level or levels you assign (typically Level 1 and Level 3). Initial support calls are routed either to your in-house IT support group or to Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC), based on your requirements. Level 2 or 3 incidents can be promoted to Progent's Experts Team of subject matter experts (SMEs). The escalation procedure is transparent to your clients. Your business has unrestricted versatility to extend or shrink your share of IT support activity as circumstances demand. Progent provides startup deployment and onboarding of the professional services PSA software plus documentation, testing and training.

Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC)
Progent's Technical Response Center has been providing remote technical support for more than two decades and has active customers in each state in the country (see Progent's customer testimonials.) The TRC maintains the team of certified computer experts who can handle Level 1 issues, which make up the bulk of Help Desk support requests. The TRC, like Progent's Experts Team, uses the ConnectWise Manage professional services automation (PSA) software platform to automate ticketing, status tracking, ownership assignment, escalation and management reporting. This prevents problems from being ignored and offers users clear understanding about all services provided. The Technical Response Center is committed to 90% in-person answer rate and enables Progent's Shared Help Desk Services to include a 60-minute service-level agreement (SLA). Support hours are 5am to 7pm Pacific Time on standard business days. Extended support hours and on-premises support are offered at extra cost. For more details about the TRC, refer to Progent's TRC Customer Commitment.

Definition of Service Levels
Progent provides three distinct levels of remote technical support, which correspond to industry-recognized Tier 1 through Tier 3 service. You can define which service levels will be handled exclusively or shared by Progent's support team and your in-house staff. The size and scope of Progent's team of subject matter experts (SMEs) enables fast and effective escalation and permits you to count on Progent as a single source for most IT problems at any Tier. In addition, Progent's practice of knowledge transfer permits key support issues to move from higher to lower Tiers as resolution processes become recorded and normalized so they can be performed by less knowledgeable and less expensive support personnel.

Service levels are described as:

• Level 1 Support: Categorizes Help Desk requests and provides baseline technical support and troubleshooting, like password issues, printer configurations, break/fix instructions, 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 identified Level 2 and Level 3 issues where mitigation solutions have already been documented.
• Level 2 Support: Generally handles break/fix, configuration issues, debugging, software installations, and hardware repair including in-house fixes or orchestrating depot support. Level 2 support deals with escalated problems that Level 1 support is not qualified to resolve. Level 2 can sometimes escalate to Level 3, depending on the problem and the way the Service Desk is structured.
• Level 3 Support: Debugging, setup, database administration, and repair for OS and applications servers, hybrid networks, messaging, collaboration, and various infrastructure issues. Besides having the ability to deploy solutions to new problems, a Level 3 engineer typically has the most experience.

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

1. Your employees generate requests for support via the browser-based support, a dedicated telephone number, or simply by sending an email to a specific mailbox. This automatically launches an open request in the trouble ticket system.
2. Progent's Technical Response Center gets the ticket request and decides if it will be handles or escalated to your internal Service Desk.
3. Your Service Desk receives the promoted ticket request and decides the best way to resolve the issue. If necessary, your Help Desk can send the open request back to Progent for resolution by Progent's Experts Team.
4. Progent receives the updated trouble ticket request, identifies the best suited subject matter exert from the Experts Team, and assigns the designated SME to co-operate with your support team until the problem is fixed or closed.

Highlights of Progent's Help Desk Service
Top aspects of Progent's Co-managed Service Desk program include:

• Pooled desktop support from Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC) team
• Desktop remote help available 5 days a week, 5am-7pm Pacific Time, 60 Minute SLA
• Special hourly rate with per-minute granularity for Tier 1 support for users
• Typical price of Level 1 support is about $18 per user monthly
• Level 2 and Level 3 help from Progent SME provided on request at Progent's normal consulting rates
• De-escalation allows problems that initially call for Level 2 or 3 expertise to drop to a lower, less costly Level once solutions are documented
• StreamlineIT includes a full implementation of ConnectWise Manage with multi-tenant security

• Offered only in USA and US territories
• One-time startup charge based on complexity of the solution
• Live Answer of incoming support requests to Progent Technical Response Center (TRC) with a target of 90% Live Answer of all requests
• After determining if server or network infrastructure assistance is needed, some service calls will be passed to Level 2 or 3 support
• All assistance requiring Level 2 or 3 expertise will be handled by a Progent consultant pending customer authorization
• 1 hour SLA for Level 1 desktop support in most cases
• Level 1 Service is for end users and applies to Windows-based computers and Apple devices
• Progent Level 2 or 3 services will be provided at standard hourly consulting prices
• Progent will provide personnel - Technical Response Center desktop engineers during standard hours, Level 2 and Level 3 as needed
• Progent will provide a toll-free phone number and email mailbox for incoming support calls
• Free Remote Control agent with screen sharing for efficient technical troubleshooting
• Free ProSight IT Asset Management services for cloud-based network documentation management
• All Level 1 online support is billed at a special desktop hourly rate with one-minute granularity
• All Level 1 service will be done remotely, no onsite support included
• All on-premises work is invoiced at standard consulting rates
• All on-premises support will have an additional fixed fee plus any documented travel costs
• All travel cost estimates will be provided and need customer approval before work or travel will be undertaken
• Projects and distinct Statements of Work (SoWs) will include their individual estimates and costs outlined and will be undertaken only after authorization by customer

First Steps

• Create your custom Service Desk experience, setting up your in-house team, service locations, and client data
• Progent will work with your company's support group to analyze current inbound service calls
• Configure your incoming help request service to include a mailbox, software agents, and a dedicated telephone number

• Progent delivers ticket management training for your support group
• Work together to establish core workflow and ticket escalation processes
• Integrate all your teams and assets that will deliver support services
• Create the introduction description and selling of the new Service Desk solution
• Select a specific location or manageably-sized groups to onboard first
• Bring more groups of users into the system at a workable pace

• Study reports and system configuration for efficient data and workflow
• Create additional reports or fields needed to improve the identification or tracking of common IT problems
• Surface missing information that might enable a better success percentage for Level 1 support requests

• All users have been introduced to the support system and can connect to it
• All required user and equipment information is entered into the service system
• You can exchange and administer tickets transparently between your in-house support group and Progent
• You can track daily, weekly and monthly support performance and trends

• Keep total control of your IT service requests: you choose what trouble tickets are forwarded to Progent's service group or handled by your internal service team.
• Quick access to additional IT support professionals when you require them: Progent's professional services automation software automatically distributes internal tickets or permits you manually escalate to Progent's Technical Response Center.
• Productivity: Progent's Call Desk experts will analyze your current incoming support requests and propose additional data that would allow a higher resolution rate for typical desktop issues. Progent's consultants can also assist you with tag management to speed up solutions.
• Seamlessness: Progent's Shared Service Desk is a seamless supplement to your in-house Help Desk with unified ticketing and documentation so no request falls through the seams.
• Happy workers: Users can monitor the status of their IT support calls quickly and conveniently.
• Management insight: You benefit from the measurements, accountability, and performance monitoring of an advanced PSA system to assist your organization to create a custom-designed Call Center experience that delivers maximum business value.
• Concentrate on your core business initiatives, not IT support requests and disgruntled end-users: Your network management personnel avoid being bogged down trying to manage common service requests.

Read Progent's White Paper: Is Co-managed IT a Good Idea?
Even though supporting a self-sufficient local network support team can be expensive from the cost standpoint, a lot of businesses opt for that strategy since it provides them more control over their network management. Yet did you know that you can continue to reap the advantages of a managed IT services provider using the co-managed network service approach. The co-managed services model enables your organization to keep in control over your IT infrastructure while augmenting your local IT staff easily and economically.

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

Download Progent's Shared Help Desk Datasheet
To view a one-page datasheet in PDF format describing Progent's Shared Help Desk, see:
Progent's Shared Help Desk Datasheet. (PDF - 108 KB)

Complementary Services
Progent has packaged the ProSight family of remote monitoring and management (RMM) services to automate critical processes associated with network management, security and maintenance. Any of these services can be integrated with Progent's Shared Help Desk service by installing agent apps on machines to be tracked and managed. Notifications generated by these software agents can be forwarded directly to Progent's Technical Response Center, processed via the trouble ticket and tracking platform, and triaged for Level 1, 2 or 3 treatment.

Samples of ProSight RMM services include:

• ProSight Email Guard: Email Content Filtering, Spam Blocking and Data Leakage Protection:
  ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam and virus filtering service that uses the infrastructure of leading information security companies to provide web-based management and world-class security for all your email traffic. The powerful architecture of Progent's Email Guard managed service combines a Cloud Protection Layer with an on-premises security gateway appliance to offer advanced defense against spam, viruses, Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks, DHAs, and other email-borne malware. Email Guard's Cloud Protection Layer acts as a preliminary barricade and blocks the vast majority of threats from making it to your security perimeter. This reduces your vulnerability to inbound threats and saves network bandwidth and storage space. Email Guard's on-premises gateway appliance adds a further layer of inspection for inbound email. For outgoing email, the onsite security gateway provides AV and anti-spam protection, policy-based Data Loss Prevention, and email encryption. The on-premises security gateway can also assist Exchange Server to track and safeguard internal email traffic that originates and ends within your security perimeter. For more information, visit ProSight Email Guard spam and content filtering.

• ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM): Behavior-based Threat Analysis and Ransomware Defense:
  ProSight Active Security Monitoring is an endpoint protection solution that incorporates cutting edge behavior machine learning technology from SentinelOne to defend physical and virtual endpoints against modern malware assaults such as ransomware and file-less exploits, which easily get by traditional signature-based AV products. ProSight Active Security Monitoring protects on-premises and cloud resources and provides a unified platform to automate the complete threat progression including blocking, identification, mitigation, remediation, and post-attack forensics. Top features include single-click rollback using Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and automatic network-wide immunization against new threats. Progent is a SentinelOne Partner, dealer, and integrator. Learn more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) next-generation endpoint protection and ransomware defense with SentinelOne technology.

• ProSight Data Protection Services: Cloud-based Backup and Disaster Recovery:
  Progent has partnered with leading backup/restore technology vendors to produce ProSight Data Protection Services, a selection of subscription-based offerings that deliver backup-as-a-service. All ProSight DPS services manage and monitor your data backup processes and allow transparent backup and fast restoration of vital files, applications, system images, plus Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines. ProSight DPS helps your business recover from data loss resulting from equipment failures, natural calamities, fire, malware like ransomware, user error, malicious employees, or software glitches. Managed services in the ProSight Data Protection family include ProSight DPS Altaro VM Backup, ProSight 365 Total Backup (formerly Altaro Office 365 Backup), ProSight ECHO Backup based on Barracuda dedicated hardware, and ProSight DPS MSP360 Hybrid Backup. Your Progent consultant can help you to determine which of these managed backup services are most appropriate for your IT environment.

• Patch Management: Patch Management Services:
  Progent's support services for patch management offer organizations of all sizes a flexible and cost-effective solution for evaluating, testing, scheduling, implementing, and tracking software and firmware updates to your ever-evolving information network. In addition to maximizing the protection and functionality of your computer environment, Progent's software/firmware update management services free up time for your in-house IT team to concentrate on line-of-business projects and activities that deliver the highest business value from your information network. Find out more about Progent's software/firmware update management support services.

• ProSight Duo Two-Factor Authentication: Access Security, Endpoint Policy Enforcement, and Secure Single Sign-on (SSO):
  Progent's Duo authentication service plans incorporate Cisco's Duo cloud technology to defend against compromised passwords through the use of two-factor authentication. Duo supports single-tap identity confirmation on iOS, Android, and other personal devices. With 2FA, when you sign into a protected application and enter your password you are requested to confirm who you are on a device that only you possess and that is accessed using a different network channel. A wide selection of out-of-band devices can be utilized as this added form of ID validation including an iPhone or Android or watch, a hardware token, a landline telephone, etc. You may register multiple verification devices. For more information about ProSight Duo identity validation services, visit Cisco Duo MFA two-factor authentication (2FA) services.