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 Corporation concerning architecture strategy definitions as well as project and change management aspects.

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

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

Workplace deployment project

As a Microsoft solution integrator, Sword Corporation 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.

Workstation life-cycle management

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

Drawing on its experience, Sword Corporation 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.

System virtualisation project

Sword Corporation 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 Corporation is now their favoured partner when it comes to IT projects.

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

Sword Corporation 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 Corporation.

Within this project, Sword Corporation 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 Corporation was responsible for the implementation of all agreements with various suppliers: hosting, connectivity, telephony, providing material.

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.