Our projects

Sword Technologies is working on major projects in various areas of activity. Our modular approach allows us to offer service “bricks” or components based on each client’s requirements. Examples of the projects we have carried out are:

Streamline workstation management for all sites (2,500 stations)

Professional objectives

  • Streamline workstation management for all sites (2,500 stations)
  • Enable Windows 10 deployment and ensure provision of Builds (Feature Updates) to all stations
  • Supply workstation, application-deployment and update-management installation services throughout all remote sites
  • Supply work-station reports and inventaries
  • Automate service requests

Implementation solution

  • Analysis of current environment to establish working needs
  • SCCM infrastructure audit : 1 primary server, 3 secondary servers, 22 distribution points
  • Windows 10 deployment-service and application implementation, upgrade management 
  • Implementation of a task-deployment sequence across all Core, « New Station » and « Reinstallation » scenario applications
  • Creation of a Windows 10 update task sequence
  • Creation of portals (PowerApps) upon request for station and application deployment with System Center Orchestrator integration
  • Implementation of Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection solution
  • Study of MBAM infrastructure deployment on Azure

Results obtained

  • Application-deployment integration ongoing (30)
  • Integration of Quality Updates deployment cycles
  • Windows version 1803 test-phase deployment
  • Setting out of new management processes – ongoing
  • Preparation of comprehensive deployment

Federation services deployment

Environment :

Implementation of a federation services architecture and synchronization service to provide simplified and secured identity federation with Microsoft Azure Active Directory, Web single sign-on (SSO) capabilities to support SaaS Application authentication, Office 365 and Dynamics AX.

Design and deployment of Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) and Web Application Proxy in 3-tier architecture network and Azure AD Connect servers.

Business goals

  • Being able to interface with Cloud environments (Public or Private) of all types (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS).
  • Provide Web Single Sign-On authentication functionalities to internal environments.
  • Scoped Microsoft applications and products that use authentication standards such as WS-Federation, SAML 2.0, and Oauth2.
  • Highly available and accessible from outside and inside and respect the security constraints of the target DMZ 3-Tier architecture

Technology stack

Windows Server 2012 R2, Active Directory, Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), Web Application Proxy, Exchange Server 2010, Azure Active Directory Synchronization tools (Azure AD Connect), F5 BIG-IP Load Balancer, Azure PaaS Infrastructure, PowerShell.

Sector

Client is an insurance company offering health insurance services in Switzerland. It covers the medical expenses covered by compulsory health insurance (LAMal).

Office 365 Migration

Environment:

Office 365 migration from hosted Exchange platform and several Active Directory, deployment of Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) and Enterprise Mobility and Security, Microsoft Intune, Multi-Factor Authentication MFA, Self-Service Password Reset.

Business goals

  • The client wanted to improve investments and take le opportunity of the Cloud to leverage services for their employees with a dedicated environment in a full collaborative approach (Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility & Security (EMS)).
  • Migrate the existing Hosted Messaging systems to Exchange Online
  • Synchronize on-premises directories to the main Active Directory Domain and enable single sign-on, Configure Office 365 tenant services
  • Deploy authentication architecture with AD FS that ensure an optimal security with Multi-Factor Authentication MFA, Self-Service Password Reset
  • Empower mobility with Mobile Device Management (Microsoft Intune), to control employee access to corporate applications and data on virtually any device.
  • Execute the pilot migration, validation and production migration for mailbox and archive
  • Provide Post-migration support for It and end-user
  • Provide detailed migration procedures, architecture documentation et training to IT Team

Technology stack

Windows Server 2012 R2, Active Directory, Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), Web Application Proxy, Azure Active Directory Synchronization tools (Azure AD Connect), Exchange Server 2010, Hybrid Deployment, AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Office 365, Office 2016, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business, PowerShell, C#.

Sector

The client is a leading independent European financial services company specialized in advisory and brokerage services, research, execution and advisory services for investment companies.

Office 365 Migration

Environment:

Client started its transformation to the Cloud. The first step of the transformation is to move its messaging environment into the Office 365. The migration to Office 365 takes into consideration all security and compliance aspects.

Business goals

  • Assess and ensure that all infrastructure elements are ready for the migration
  • Remediate identities and prepare infrastructure
  • Prepare the Change Management Strategy (communication plan)
  • Migrate users (pilot & massive)
  • Avoid end-user service disruption

Technology stack

    • Windows Server 2012R2, Active Directory, Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), HA Proxy Load balancing, Azure AD Connect, Exchange Server 2013, Office 365, Office 2016, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business Server
    • Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Self-Service Password Reset

Sector

The client is a Swiss company producing, distributing and marketing energy, also active in energy services.

Azure Datacenter transformation and Office 365 security and compliance

Environment

Security is a top challenge for organization in their digital transformation with the cloud. The client is focusing on transforming current Virtual datacenter workloads to Azure Services as well as the securisation of cloud services, comply with GDPR regulatory law, protect and classify data in Office 365, SharePoint, OneDrive and Azure.

Business goals

  • Transform the actual Virtual Datacenters hosted in Geneva; Hong Kong and New York to new multi-regions Microsoft Azure architecture.
  • Centralize the branch offices infrastructures workloads by migrating to Microsoft Azure workloads (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and Hybrid).
  • Implements a secure hybrid network that extends the on-premises network to Azure with Riverbed solutions.
  • Extend the Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) environment to Azure to provide distributed authentication and start moving workload to Azure.
  • Use Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), upgrade the actual farm 2012 R2 to 2016, to perform federated authentication and authorization for components running in Azure.
  • Secure access of cloud services with additional second step authentication and conditional access, MFA
  • Migrate the actual Active Directory Certification Authority to Offline Root CA with a Subordinate CA.
  • Implement Office 365 Data Protection and documents classification to ensure that important data and sensitive content stays secure.
  • Help users seamlessly exchange encrypted and protected email and prevent inappropriate sharing of sensitive data in documents and emails.
  • Help the organization to protect data, comply with legal and regulatory standard GDPR.

Technology stack

    • Windows Server 2016, Active Directory, Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), Kemp LoadMaster Load Balancing, Azure AD Connect, Exchange Server 2016, Office 365, Office 2016, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business Server.
    • Azure, Azure Networking, Azure Traffic Manager, Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection, Office 365 Data Loss Prevention, Azure Information Protection, Compliance Manager, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Sector

The client is an independently owned company with headquarters in Geneva, helping companies and associations drive business results through association management, congress management, meeting and event management.

Office 365 Governance and identity management

Environment:

The goal of this project is to implement Office 365 education collaborative services, build the infrastructure to support secure identity management and authentication for students, teachers and faculty staff with Microsoft cloud products, including Azure Active Directory, Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams.

Business goals:

Bring modern tools for a collaborative classroom to students and teachers through Office 365 Education, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and now Microsoft Teams.
Assistance on the overall process of creating tenant, securing and configuring Office 365 for Education services.
Implement governance in Office 365 services and provide fine-grained access management of office 365 services and resources to school administrators.
Provide federated authentication to manage authentication and identity services for students and teachers in Office 365 and others cloud or local applications.
Organize messaging resources, distribution groups, address books for school, section and classroom with Azure AD School Sync. Sync Active Directory and student’s information system.

Technology stack

Windows Server 2016, Active Directory, Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), Citrix NetScaler Load Balancing physical appliance, Azure AD Connect, Exchange Server 2016, Office 365, Office 2016, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business.

Sector – Education

The client supervises training and internships between the end of compulsory education and higher education.
The client offers training mainly in two major areas: vocational training and secondary education.

International Services Company

Office 365 Migration

With the growing popularity of online services (SaaS – Software as a Service) but also considering the complexity and expense of maintaining on-premises IT infrastructures, more and more companies are thinking about the adoption of fully packaged Office 365 offers.

Our customer, a worldwide services and consulting group, took the decision to extend its IT infrastructure to Office 365 using the hybrid mode.

This enables the conciliation of:

  • legal obligations to keep information stored on its own local systems
  • flexibility, easy implementation/operation as well as maintenance and cost optimization associated with the use of Office 365

The project started with the setup of an identity federation platform (Active Directory Federation Services based) within a highly available datacentre environment. Then, the e-mail (Microsoft Exchange) and collaboration (Microsoft SharePoint) platforms were the first environments hybridised and migrated to Office 365.

In less than 4 weeks, 1,200 mailboxes were transferred to the cloud in a transparent way for the users.

The most sensitive of them, some 300, remained hosted on the on-premises servers. The two e-mail environments work in full symbiosis.

 

Furthermore, users’ accounts management and provisioning processes were reviewed in order to be adapted to the new hybrid environment.

The migration was also simplified and automated to its maximum in order to facilitate the onboarding and offboarding of the Exchange Online mailboxes.

Following this first step, this company is now fully committed to moving forward with the adoption of cloud services provided by Microsoft.

They are already thinking about implementing Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Intune as well as upgrading its Office 365 to E5 in order to migrate its on-premises Lync + Unified Messaging/Telephony platform to office 365.

All these projects are currently driven by Sword Technologies concerning architecture strategy definitions as well as project and change management aspects.

This type of project highlights the capacity of Sword Technologies to implement cutting edge technologies while performing gradual and user-transparent migrations.

Architecture firm – Vaud

Microsoft Windows 10 migration

Microsoft currently offers a free upgrade from Windows 7 and 8 to Windows 10 until July 2016. As a consequence Sword is regularly asked to carry out such projects.

Sword has just delivered a W10 migration for an architecture firm in Vaud. The goal was to provide the users with the latest Windows functionalities and to standardize the workstations’ OS.

We started this project by a validation phase to enable application compatibility with Edge. Following this analysis and to guarantee interoperability, we implemented the Internet Explorer Enterprise.

To minimize impact upon users and business, we performed the migration in batches. The update was loaded beforehand on to all workstations using WSUS then launched manually by our teams. The downtime per user was no longer than 30mn.

Sword Technologies is carrying out more and more of these projects and has set up an easy and effective methodology to simplify user adoption.

Geneva-based manufacturing company

Workplace deployment project

As a Microsoft solution integrator, Sword Technologies delivered a workplace deployment project to a Geneva-based manufacturing company.

The challenge was to offer a flexible solution which fits the business requirements and specially the budget.

We decided to deploy a solution based on Remote Desktop Service to offer an effective work environment accessible from anywhere.

Our added value was to bring high level expertise in order to optimize the Remote Desktop Service administration and maintenance.

Our client’s request was to be able to internally administrate the solution deployed. Therefore we decided to offer a pool of engineering days to assist the IT team throughout the project on 2 aspects:

  • Technical issues
  • To carry out some tasks for which they did not have the knowledge internally

As a result our client is autonomous in the run phase, and we now act as an L3 support if required.

This project highlights one of our key differentiators: to have the ability and be willing to adapt our approach to a context and to fit our clients’ needs and strategy perfectly.

International Sport federation in Lausanne

Workstation life-cycle management

Sword Technologies was commissioned to come up with an innovative and flexible solution for this client’s work station management. Constraints linked to this project were clearly laid out. Sword Technologies had to come up with a solution for managing and supporting on- and off-site work stations, ensuring an advanced level of management (updating, anti-virus management, software deployment and reporting).

For this project, Sword Technology defined three phases: analysis, implementation and deployment, in line with the client’s constraints (employee travel, competition schedule, …)

Drawing on its experience, Sword Technologies was able to propose a series of processes to manage employee arrival and departure as well as full management of the employee’s work station based on Microsoft’s Enterprise Management Suite (EMS) technology.

Private school near Geneva

System virtualisation project

Sword Technologies was commissioned to rebuild server infrastructure all the way from the sizing study to the system launch.

The following key stages were completed:

  • Capacity management
  • Storage consolidation
  • Application of a vSphere cluster made up of 3 physical hosts / a 2-storage subsystem SAN/8GB FC
  • P2V migration of 20 servers

Along with this project, a further technical challenge was to migrate directory services from OpenLdap to Microsoft Active Directory and centralise user and group management using a FileMaker base as an entry point.

Based on this success, Sword Technologies is now their favoured partner when it comes to IT projects.

International Finance company setting up its holding operation in Switzerland

Start-to-finish information system design, deployment and support project

Sword Technologies was commissioned to determine the server as well as client IT architecture. The latter was then rolled out, made available to users and is now operated and supported directly by Sword Technologies.

Within this project, Sword Technologies has carried out:

  • A needs study and guidance towards the most appropriate functional, technical and financial solutions in collaboration with the client’s IT teams based in a branch office abroad
  • The configuration of IT architecture consistent with the requirements and constraints as expressed by the client
  • The deployment of client and server infrastructure (preparation of premises, server rooms, client stations, IT, telephones etc.), both on premises and hosted in a IaaS environment with one of our partners
  • Data migration from the existing client environment and its integration in the new infrastructure
  • System launch and user reception
  • The operation and maintenance of rolled-out platforms as well as user support

Within this start-to-finish IT project, Sword Technologies was responsible for the implementation of all agreements with various suppliers: hosting, connectivity, telephony, providing material.

Service desk management for an international client

In order to benefit from a service centre managed essentially by an outside contractor, one of our clients requested us to make available to his users a level-1 support team. This team, made up of six people on two separate sites, is responsible for some 2,000 users. The same team are also in connection with relocated teams on five other sites around the world.

There are many areas of activity: for example, work station systems (Windows 8.1 then 10), messaging under Office 365, the applications used, telephones (Android, Windows Phone or iOS) and videoconference rooms. Support is 24/7 with rotation and stand-ins organised by the team leader. Standard procedure is to gather requests in the form of tickets, analyse then solve the issue.

When the solution cannot be found directly by the level-1 team, tickets are redirected to more specialised groups, though following up on the ticket and communication with the user remain the responsibility of the original team.

Functioning this way and improved with time, a rating of 90% of solutions found has been achieved and maintained. Such good figures are the result of improved ticket flow through various groups as well as applying ITIL service management practices.