The Swiss Football Association (SFA) is the oldest football association in Europe and organizes national football operations in Switzerland. It brings together around 1,400 clubs and several thousand officials who form the backbone of Swiss football. As a central organization, the SFA ensures clear structures, modern infrastructure, and reliable processes.
The Challenge
For its daily operations, the SFA collaborates with several hundred external individuals – officials, referees, association representatives, and other partners who require access to content in Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.
This is where the challenge emerged: many of these people did not sign in with individual email addresses but with shared functional mailboxes such as praesident@verein.ch. As a result, IT could hardly determine:
- Who these guests actually are
- Which role they hold
- Which club or organization they belong to
- Who is internally responsible for them
On top of that, the SFA already had around 2,000 guests in its tenant before Seamless was introduced. Keeping track was difficult. Many invitations were never accepted, while other guests had long been inactive but were still listed in the directory.
The Solution
With Seamless, the SFA was able to create full transparency for the first time. The tool helped categorize existing guest accounts into clear groups:
- active guests
- inactive guests
- outdated invitations
This immediately provided IT with a solid foundation for cleaning up the tenant.
But even after the initial cleanup phase, more than 1,000 guests remained without information such as first name, last name, club, role, or responsible person.
This is where a key function of Seamless came into play: inviting guests to independently update their own guest information via the Seamless Guest Portal.
With just one click, all guests were invited and could add or correct their details themselves. Missing or outdated data could thus be captured reliably and efficiently – without manual follow-up and without IT intervention.
The Benefit
After the data cleanup, the Seamless Governance & Lifecycle Policies now ensure that the SFA maintains oversight on an ongoing basis:
- Guests who have been inactive for a long time are automatically deactivated or removed.
- Individuals who do not respond to inquiries are offboarded based on defined rules.
- All relevant attributes remain complete and up to date.
As a result, the SFA now has a stable, transparent, and secure guest structure, significantly simplifying daily operations.
The Result
Thanks to Seamless, the SFA now always knows:
- who has access to Microsoft 365 resources
- why these individuals require access
- which club is behind each guest account
- who is internally responsible
The association has regained full control over its guest users and ensures — through the automated governance and lifecycle policies of Seamless — that it stays that way.
“With Seamless, we were finally able to create transparency over our large number of external guests. For us as an association with hundreds of external officials, this is a huge gain in security and efficiency.”
Marc Rauber, Head of ICT Operations & Services SFA