Synergie Training are delighted to announce that we have once again beaten off stiff competition and been successful in winning the UHI Microsoft Consultancy and Training tender via Public Contract Scotland.

The University of the Highlands & Islands consists of 13 independent colleges and research institutions and is looking to update the services provided by its Microsoft Active Directory and was seeking a suitably qualified company to provide this.

The winning bid covered several topics, including:

SCCM

It was looking to capitalise on its investment in SCCM 2012 R2, to ensure that SCCM develops into the primary method across the University for the following:

• Operating system and application delivery.
• Device management and support.
• Reporting

Synergie Training is being brought in to ensure that this system is effectively maintained and kept up to date and to take advantage of mobile device management and ensure that off-site devices can be managed and patched.

Office 365

The University is looking to expand its use of the cloud services available to it within a current Office 365 Tenant. There are currently over 50,000 user and group objects synchronised into Office 365 using Azure Active Directory Sync, with authentication currently being provided via four ADFS 3.0 servers – Three on premise and one in Azure. Synergie Training will look to develop both the account synchronisation and ADFS 3.0 service to provide the following:

• An Azure only ADFS 3.0 service providing high availability for both on premise and off site users.
•  An upgrade to AAD Connect using a full SQL database to ensure that the University can eventually synchronise over 100,000 user and group objects for SharePoint etc.
•  Integrate applications used by the University – such as Lynda.com – to enable SSO.

Cloud services

The University is looking to invest in the cloud services with an ultimate goal of migrating on premise data centre to the cloud to provide a high availability service. It currently has a small tenancy in Azure but is looking to investigate a larger deployment with a cloud provider.

As these cloud services are a constantly evolving technology, Synergie Training will use past experience whereby we have migrated & managed services to the cloud and use a hybrid design of both on premise virtual machines and cloud based virtual machines so it can be easily managed.

Training

From its purpose built training venue in Inverness Synergie Training will also provide bespoke  Microsoft Training for UHI staff.