IT Technology News and Progent Solutions

In an address at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft Corp. head Steve Ballmer announced the beta release of the Windows 7 operating system. The new incarnation of Windows was available temporarily for evaluation at select web sites. During the CES talk, CEO Balmer showed innovative capabilities and key improvements incorporated into Windows and inspired by customer demands. Areas focused on by Windows 7, according to Balmer, cover performance, security, reliability, compatibility, battery life, and intuitive operation. In all of these categories, Windows 7 offers significant improvement.

Microsoft Windows 7 features faster startup, power off, and recovery from standby; no-hassle networking and resource access; centralized peripherals management; as well as multiple finger multitouch technology. To see Microsoft's press release, refer to Microsoft Previews Windows 7

How Progent's Consulting Professionals Can Assist Your Business to Plan for Microsoft Windows 7
Progent's certified engineers can assist you to evaluate the beta version of Microsoft Windows 7 to verify application compatibility and to check its performance and stability working in your environment. Progent can also help you assess the likely business advantages of adopting Microsoft Windows 7. If Microsoft Windows 7 makes sense for your business, Progent can assist you to plan and implement a non-disruptive upgrade to Windows 7 from a an older version of Windows.

Progent's IT professionals can provide a variety of other affordable support options to enhance the efficiency, dependability, protection, performance, and manageability of IT networks that include desktops based on Windows 7:

Desktop Consulting and Support Services
Progent's Microsoft Gold certified desktop support consultants offer a wide range of affordable services to assist your business to install, configure, repair, and administer desktop PCs and laptops based on Windows. Progent can offer onsite or online help for individual machines or notebooks or help you to plan and implement a company-wide migration to Microsoft Windows 7. Progent can also install Office or Microsoft Dynamics programs on your workstations so they integrate efficiently with all Microsoft programs, software from popular vendors, SQL databases, and line-of-business services network-wide. Progent can also provide consultants and technicians to assist you to prepare for and complete a company relocation or consolidation designed to cause minimal interruption to your productivity.

Live Virtual Instruction for Desktop Applications
Progent provides live virtual instruction for a range of client programs and environments including Excel, Word, Access, Visio, Acrobat Writer, Photoshop, Crystal Reports, and Windows XP and Vista. Virtual education provides the advantages of conventional in-person seminars, including instant interaction between clients and trainers, but eliminates the costs of travel and the hassle of trying to accommodate the availability of many trainees. Offered to single students or groups of any size, live online education allows the instructor to conduct the seminar from a remote facility while the students can be spread throughout a campus or all over the the U.S. Virtual education supports proven learning mechanisms like virtual white boards, real-time questions, and collaborative applications. Sessions can be brief and personalized for specific topics or extended in time and wider in coverage. Teachers and clients can go through examples one-on-one or as a group.

64-bit Migration Support for Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows Servers
Windows 7 is offered in a 64-bit edition that sets a new benchmark for workstation dependability and capacity. Unfortunately, for most organizations the upgrade to 64-bit processing is problematic due to the requirement to make a clean setup on every PC. This requires reconfiguring applications, saving and recovering data files, and installing new drivers. Though businesses typically already have 64-bit hardware, the work required to take full advantage of these resources can seem excessively time-consuming. But because Windows 7 usually requires a clean installation, it represents a good opportunity to move up to 64-bit computing, which is possible with little more effort. Progent's Microsoft consulting experts have in-depth experience planning and performing massive, minimally disruptive operating system upgrades of in-place desktops and can assist your company leverage your IT budget by performing the migration to Windows 7 and to 64-bit technology simultaneously.

Update Automation
Progent's IT administration professionals can help you create an information network built around Windows 7 workstations that is easy to administer. Progent's consultants have extensive backgrounds delivering small and midsize businesses SMS Server 2003 expertise to streamline network administration's processes, improve system protection, improve efficiency by making sure that all patches and updates are installed, enforce software licensing compliance, and monitor characteristics of software usage to enable a more efficient purchasing strategy. Also, Progent can assist your company to make a smooth upgrade to Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 from SMS Server 2003 for more complete administration automation and can help you to move to Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

Security Inventory Scanning and Evaluation Packages
Progent's certified security engineers can provide a variety of cost-effective small business network security inventory bundles and enterprise network security evaluation bundles designed to give businesses of any size an opportunity to get a professional opinion about the quality of their protection profile. The packages vary from a low-cost external scan and assessment package for small companies up to a high-level package for enterprises who need to comply with security standards required by government regulators or by customers. For every security assessment package, consultants with high-level security credentials analyze and summarize collected information and provide suggestions for effective remediation.

Fault-tolerant System Design
Progent’s consulting professionals can assist your company to configure a fault-tolerant system infrastructure with features such as Windows Hyper-V failover clustering, auto-failover Internet connections, network load balancing, and strategic data centers. Progent offers the services of Microsoft and Cisco-Premier network professionals who can show you how to utilize virtualization to improve availability. Progent can also show you how to develop a complete business continuity strategy that includes scheduled disaster recovery assessments and testing.

Call Center Outsourcing and Expertise
Progent is a Microsoft and Cisco Authorized Partner and Progent's online Help Desk support team of trained technical experts offers your clients instant access to a dependable support group with extensive experience delivering phone assistance and online troubleshooting for IT systems based on Microsoft and Cisco technology. Progent's concentration is on earning the Help Desk a positive image as a key contributor to company performance. Progent's target is to resolve and not merely record problems. Progent can deliver comprehensive Help Desk outsourcing or seamlessly reinforce your existing Help Desk. Progent can in addition assist you to select and implement the most advanced technology for creating or improving your in-house Help Desk.

To find out additional details about Progent's support services for Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008, call 1-800-993-9400 or go to Contact Progent.