Network Support for Midsize Companies

Microsoft and Cisco Consulting Best Practices
Progent's team of Microsoft and Cisco Premier consultants average longer than ten years of real-world professional background, in the trenches of network support, executing a broad variety of IT projects for an extensive mix of clients. Every Progent consultant shares a refined set of best practices which are combined into company-wide best practices training that Progent teaches its consulting team. This ensures that you get not only expert IT skills, but also a support engineer with field-tested approaches for applying computer knowledge to fix actual IT problems efficiently.

Features and benefits of Progent's best practices include:

• Individual Professionals
  Progent's team of IT engineers is made up of among the most accomplished Microsoft and Cisco professionals in the industry. Averaging more than a decade of real-world background per consultant, Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified experts offer a tested set of methods for solving technical issues, planning projects, and providing consulting services. The technical depth of Progent's support team enables Progent to offer your business a consulting expert with task-relevant ability and an efficient technique for delivering quick and affordable IT solutions.

• Reliance on Teamwork
  When appropriate, Progent relies on a group approach to resolving the most difficult network issues. By aggregating hundreds of man-years of background from Progent's Microsoft and Cisco Certified professionals, Progent can quickly and efficiently handle even the most vexing issues. Working with hundreds of customers and completing thousands of sophisticated deployment and configuration jobs annually gives Progent a special perspective on which approaches work and which ones do not. Subtle software interactions are a minefield for even the most skilled engineers unless they bring a long and varied history in real-world experience with a broad variety of technologies.

• Corporate-wide Policies for Best Practices
  Progent has incorporated the aggregate experience of its senior engineering personnel to develop an in-house, company-wide set of leading practices designed to ensure timely, affordable solutions of information technology issues and to track and maximize customer satisfaction. These methodologies include a strong emphasis on customer communication and support recording. Progent's Founder and President, Les Kent, has a 35-year background of successful technology integration, corporate management, sales and marketing, and administration. Progent's company-wide best practices are strongly driven by Mr. Kent's experiences creating challenging information technology solutions while working as a system architect, program developer, project manager, deployment professional and troubleshooter.

• Continuing Professional Education
  As a certified partner with Microsoft, Progent ensures that staff consultants undergo continued product and best-practices education that contains important information and methods for new product integration that have been gleaned from the experience of thousands of technical professionals worldwide. This results in continually more efficient provision of services to Progent's clients.

• Internal Database of Problems and Proven Solutions
  Progent's advanced service documentation system offers comprehensive records for all provided support. Every Progent team member has complete availability of the specifics of support provided by any consultant to each customer. This record of issues and solutions, plus false alarms and missteps, is organized as readily accessible in-house information store that enables Progent's consultants to communicate their experiences company-wide so that the overall efficiency of Progent's support grows continuously. This database also reduces your dependence on an individual engineer by allowing any Progent consultant to pick up where another left off while saving hours spent getting up to speed on your network setup. Another benefit of Progent's service reporting system is that your business can more smoothly handle IT support duties in house if it becomes economical to do so, or you can migrate to a different IT outsourcing firm if you become unhappy with Progent's service.

• Microsoft Solutions Framework Project Methodology
  For major initiatives, Progent engineers use the Microsoft Solutions Framework methodology for providing support. MSF separates projects into distinct and rational components that reduce the risk of a project falling out of control. Each phase builds a solid base for the completion of later phases. Design and integration issues are identified at the start of the project continuum so difficulties can be anticipated and dealt with before client workflow is impacted. This also keeps costs from going through the roof because of unexpected problems during large scale roll outs. All project components are documented to create a detailed description of consulting services provided and to help in continuing network maintenance.

• Access to External Support Databases
  As certified consulting partners of Microsoft and Cisco, Progent has access to the world's most extensive information technology databases and resource pool. Among the most helpful technical databases accessible by Progent's engineers are the operational best practices incorporated into the assorted Management Packs published by Microsoft and third parties to be used with Microsoft Operations Manager, the proactive network monitoring software used as the foundation of Progent's special IT outsourcing packages. Management Packs consist of custom designed scripted rules that can respond to events, thresholds, and alerts tracked by Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. Management Packs can also provide expert advice on how to handle specific problems by automatically finding relevant technical notes from the extensive Microsoft support database.