Network Help for Small Businesses

Progent's Shared Service Desk
Progent's Shared Help Desk service allows your IT staff to divide activity for Help Desk services seamlessly between your internal network support team and Progent's extensive pool of certified IT support technicians, engineers and subject matter experts (SMEs). Progent's Co-managed Service Desk is a joint IT support system based on ConnectWise Manage, the industry-leading PSA platform for managing IT support calls, generating tickets, designating responsibility, tracking status, and generating management analytics. The price for Level 1 support for Progent's Co-managed Help Desk service averages below $18/user/month.

Progent's Co-managed Help Desk Service provides a seamless supplement to your internal support staff. End user access to the Help Desk, delivery of support, problem escalation, ticket creation and tracking, performance metrics, and maintenance of the service database are consistent whether issues are taken care of by your core support organization, by Progent, or a mix of the two. All client service requests are ranked as Level 1, 2 or 3 issues. Progent handles the support levels you specify (usually Level 1 and Level 3). Original service calls are routed to your internal support group or to Progent's Technical Response Center, depending on your instructions. Level 2 or Level 3 tickets can be referred to Progent's Experts Team of subject matter experts (SMEs). The assignment procedure is seamless for your users. You have complete flexibility to expand or reduce your share of support activity as required. Progent provides startup deployment and provisioning of the professional services automation (PSA) software as well as workflow documentation, validation and training.

Progent's Technical Response Center
Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC) has been providing remote IT assistance for over two decades and has active customers in each state in the U.S. (see Progent's customer testimonials.) The TRC provides the pool of seasoned desktop experts who can handle Level 1 issues, which represent the majority of Service Desk support requests. The TRC, like Progent's Experts Team, uses the ConnectWise Manage professional services automation (PSA) platform to automate ticketing, tracking, responsibility delegation, escalation and management reporting. This keeps tickets from falling through the cracks and offers clients clear visibility of all services delivered. Progent's Technical Response Center targets 90% live answer rate and enables Progent's Co-managed Help Desk Services to include a 60-minute service-level agreement (SLA). Support times are 5am to 7pm Pacific Time on normal work days. Extended hours and on-premises service are offered at additional cost. For more details about the Technical Response Center, refer to Progent's Technical Response Center Customer Commitment.

Service Levels
Progent provides three distinct levels of remote IT support, which are equivalent to industry-recognized Tier 1 to Tier 3 support. You can select which support levels will be handled exclusively or shared by Progent and your in-house service group. The depth and scope of Progent's roster of subject matter experts (SMEs) enables rapid and effective ticket escalation and makes it possible to count on Progent as a single source for the majority of support problems at any Tier. In addition, Progent's practice of knowledge transfer permits key service problems to move from higher to lower Tiers as solution workflows become recorded and normalized so they can be handled by less skilled and lower-cost support personnel.

Support levels are described as:

• Level 1 Support: Filters Help Desk requests and provides baseline IT help and debugging, such as password resets, 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 support can also provide assistance for identified Level 2 or Level 3 issues where solutions have previously been documented.
• Level 2 Support: Generally addresses break/fix, configuration issues, debugging, application or OS deployment, and hardware repair including on-premises repair or coordinating depot support. This Level deals with promoted problems that Level 1 personnel are not equipped to handle. Level support will occasionally escalate to Level 3, depending on the problem and the manner the Service Desk is structured.
• Level 3 Support: Debugging, configuration, database administration, and repair for server, datacenter, email, collaboration, and common infrastructure problems. In addition to having the capability to find solutions to new problems, a Level 3 engineer usually has the most expertise.

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

1. Your clients enter requests for support through the online service portal, a dedicated telephone number, or by sending an email to a dedicated mailbox. This immediately becomes an open request in the ticket system.
2. Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC) receives the trouble ticket request and determines if it will be serviced or promoted to your internal Service Desk.
3. Your Help Desk gets the promoted open request and decides the best method to service the problem. If necessary, your Help Desk can forward the open request back to Progent for resolution by Progent's Experts Team.
4. Progent gets the updated ticket request, selects the best suited SME from the Experts Team, and tasks the designated subject matter exert to work with your IT staff until the issue is fixed or closed.

Highlights of Progent's Service Desk
Important features of Progent's Co-managed Help Desk program include:

• Pooled Level 1 support from Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC) staff
• Desktop online help provided 5 days a week, 5am-7pm Pacific Time, 60 Minute SLA
• Special per-hour rate with one-minute granularity for Level 1 desktop support for clients
• Typical price of Level 1 support is around $18 montly per user
• Level 2 and Level 3 help from Progent SME available on request at Progent's standard consulting fees
• De-escalation permits issues that initially call for Level 2 or Level 3 support to migrate to a lower, less costly Level after procedures are documented
• StreamlineIT includes a complete implementation of ConnectWise Manage with secure multitenancy

• Offered only in the United States and US territories
• One-time setup charge dependent on complexity of the deployment
• Beginning day one, Progent assigns you a Technical Resource Center (TRC) Coordinator and a TRC Service Lead to resource, assign and communicate with your team and your clients. Progent's TRC Service Lead will work with you to create a What Goes Where document to help transparently escalate issues to your team 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 requests
• After determining if server or networking assistance is needed, some calls will be escalated to Level 2 or 3 support
• All support requiring Level 2 or Level 3 expertise will be handled by a Progent expert after receiving client approval
• 1 hour SLA for Level 1 desktop support in most cases
• Level 1 Service is for users and covers Windows-powered systems and Apple devices
• Progent Level 2 or 3 services will be provided at regular hourly consulting prices
• Progent will provide personnel - Technical Response Center (TRC) desktop engineers during standard hours, Level 2 and 3 as needed
• Progent will provide a phone number and email mailbox for incoming support calls
• Free Remote Control software with screen sharing for streamlined technical troubleshooting
• Free ProSight IT Asset Management solution for professional network documentation management
• All Level 1 remote service is billed at a discounted desktop hourly rate with per-minute granularity
• All Level 1 service is done online, no onsite work included
• All onsite support is invoiced at regular consulting rates
• All onsite work will have an added fixed charge as well as any specific travel expenses
• All travel cost estimates will be disclosed and require customer approval before work or travel will be undertaken
• Contracted projects and distinct Statements of Work will have their own estimates and fees stipulated and will be performed only after approval by client

Initial Steps

• Build your personalized Service Desk environment, including your internal support group, service locations, and user data
• Progent will work closely with your company's support group to analyze current incoming service requests
• Set up your inbound help request service to incorporate a mailbox, software agents, and a dedicated phone number

• Progent provides trouble ticket management education for your support team
• Jointly establish basic workflow and escalation processes
• Add all your teams and resources that will provide support
• Create the introduction message and selling of the new Call Desk solution
• Designate a specific location or small clusters of users to onboard first
• Integrate more users into the solution at a workable pace

• Study reports and system setup for efficient data and workflow
• Create additional reports or fields needed to enhance the detection or tracking of frequently seen issues
• Identify missing data that could enable a higher success rate for Level 1 service requests

• All clients have been exposed to the support desk and can access it
• All relevant client and equipment information is entered into the service system
• You are able to exchange and manage tickets transparently between your in-house team and Progent
• You are able to track daily, weekly and monthly support performance

• Keep total control of your IT support issues: you determine what trouble tickets are escalated to Progent's service group or handled by your internal service staff.
• Quick availability of supplemental IT support experts when you need them: Progent's professional services PSA software automatically distributes in-house tickets or allows you manually forward to Progent's TRC.
• Efficiency: Progent's consultants will review your current incoming service requests and identify missing data that would allow a higher resolution rate for typical Level 1 issues. Progent's Call Desk experts can also help you to improve tag management to expedite problem resolution.
• Seamlessness: Progent's Shared Service Desk works as a seamless extension of your in-house Service Desk with centralized ticketing and reporting so no ticket falls between the seams.
• Happy employees: End users can monitor the progress of their IT service calls rapidly and conveniently.
• Management analytics: You have the measurements, responsibility assignments, and performance reporting of a modern PSA system to help your organization to build a custom Service Desk experience that provides top business value.
• Focus on your core business issues, not IT support requests and unhappy users: Your IT management personnel escape being saddled with handling day-to-day support requests.

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

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

Optional Services
Progent has developed the ProSight suite of remote monitoring and management (RMM) services to streamline critical activities associated with IT management, security and upkeep. These RMM services can be used with Progent's Co-managed Call Desk service by installing agent apps on machines to be monitored and managed. Notifications sent by these software agents can be forwarded directly to Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC), processed through the trouble ticket and tracking system, and triaged for Level 1, 2 or 3 treatment.

Samples of ProSight Remote Monitoring and Management services include:

• ProSight Email Guard: Email Content Filtering, Spam Blocking and Data Leakage Defense:
  ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam and virus filtering and email encryption service that incorporates the technology of leading data security vendors to deliver centralized management and comprehensive protection for your email traffic. The hybrid architecture of Email Guard combines a Cloud Protection Layer with an on-premises gateway appliance to provide advanced protection against spam, viruses, Denial of Service Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks, and other email-borne malware. Email Guard's cloud filter acts as a first line of defense and keeps the vast majority of unwanted email from making it to your security perimeter. This decreases your vulnerability to external threats and saves network bandwidth and storage. Email Guard's on-premises security gateway device provides a deeper level of analysis for inbound email. For outgoing email, the on-premises gateway provides AV and anti-spam filtering, DLP, and email encryption. The on-premises security gateway can also help Microsoft Exchange Server to monitor and safeguard internal email traffic that originates and ends within your corporate firewall. For more information, visit Email Guard spam filtering and data leakage protection.

• ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM): AI-based Threat Analysis and Ransomware Defense:
  ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) is an endpoint protection solution that utilizes cutting edge behavior-based analysis technology from SentinelOne to defend physical and virtual endpoint devices against modern malware assaults like ransomware and email phishing, which routinely evade traditional signature-based anti-virus products. ProSight ASM protects local and cloud-based resources and provides a single platform to address the entire threat progression including protection, identification, mitigation, remediation, and post-attack forensics. Top features include single-click rollback using Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and real-time network-wide immunization against newly discovered attacks. Progent is a SentinelOne Partner, reseller, and integrator. Find out more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring endpoint protection and ransomware recovery with SentinelOne technology.

• ProSight Data Protection Services: Cloud-based Backup and Disaster Recovery:
  Progent has partnered with advanced backup/restore product companies to produce ProSight Data Protection Services, a family of management offerings that provide backup-as-a-service. All ProSight DPS services automate and track your data backup operations and enable transparent backup and fast recovery of vital files/folders, applications, images, and Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines. ProSight DPS helps you recover from data loss resulting from hardware failures, natural disasters, fire, cyber attacks like ransomware, human error, ill-intentioned insiders, or software glitches. Managed backup services in the ProSight DPS selection include ProSight Altaro VM Backup, ProSight 365 Total Backup (formerly Altaro Office 365 Backup), ProSight ECHO Backup based on Barracuda dedicated storage, and ProSight DPS MSP360 Cloud and On-prem Backup. Your Progent consultant can assist you to identify which of these fully managed services are most appropriate for your IT environment.

• Patch Management: Patch Management Services:
  Progent's support services for patch management offer businesses of all sizes a flexible and cost-effective alternative for assessing, validating, scheduling, implementing, and tracking software and firmware updates to your ever-evolving IT network. In addition to maximizing the security and functionality of your computer network, Progent's patch management services free up time for your IT team to focus on more strategic initiatives and tasks that derive the highest business value from your network. Learn more about Progent's software/firmware update management support services.

• ProSight Duo Multi-Factor Authentication: ID Confirmation, Endpoint Remediation, and Protected Single Sign-on:
  Progent's Duo MFA managed services incorporate Cisco's Duo technology to protect against password theft through the use of two-factor authentication (2FA). Duo supports single-tap identity verification with Apple iOS, Android, and other personal devices. With Duo 2FA, whenever you sign into a protected application and enter your password you are requested to confirm your identity on a unit that only you have and that is accessed using a different network channel. A broad selection of devices can be utilized as this added form of ID validation including an iPhone or Android or wearable, a hardware token, a landline telephone, etc. You can register multiple validation devices. For details about Duo identity authentication services, go to Cisco Duo MFA two-factor authentication services.