"Our hardware was getting long in the tooth and support arrangements for our existing GroupWise email solution had ended in November 2009," said Sally Soady, Head of IT at NHS Sheffield who led the NHSmail migration project. 

"To upgrade our email system locally we would have had to invest in new hardware at around £30,000 as well as meet annual support costs of £26,000."

But it wasn’t purely cost-based factors that triggered the decision to start the project in 2010 with the migration of all the local GP practices to the service, "We had been under pressure by clinical staff to move to NHSmail for some time," said Sally. "People wanted to change the way they communicated from paper-based workflows to email, particularly for sending referral information, which is why the GP practices were moved to NHSmail first." 

Secure enough for the transfer of patient data between accounts, NHSmail immediately met the needs of the clinicians who wanted an email system which could be used for speeding up communication to improve workflows.  However having the practices on NHSmail and head office and a large proportion of community staff using GroupWise, was becoming a problem as the link between the two systems isn’t secure. 

Given the cost benefits and clinical pressure, the decision to migrate was a simple one to make, and the migration started with a pilot in February 2011.  Over a subsequent three weeks, 1150 staff were moved to NHSmail, however before it all started a project had to be initiated locally to bring about a cultural shift with regards to retention of information. 

"We discovered that around 80% of emails that staff were keeping were transient and didn’t really need to be retained," explained Sally.  "Another 10% of emails were kept because we didn’t have any other mechanisms in place for sharing information." 

In the six months leading up to the migrations the team implemented a communications and engagement campaign aimed at getting people to clear out their mailboxes in line with the PCT retention policy, setting up shared areas and reviewing business processes.

"After this challenge the technical aspect of migrating data at the end was easy and went really well," said Sally.  Feedback from staff has been favourable, "People thought the migrations were going to be a lot more disruptive than they were and as an IT team we were pleasantly surprised by how easy the migration was and how few problems there were."

According to Sally the functionality of NHSmail over GroupWise has been well received and the mobile integration aspect has been very popular, especially at Director level.

So why would Sally recommend NHSmail over an alternative solution? 

"We did an options appraisal and fairly quickly ruled out procuring our own local Exchange server – this would have provided us few benefits above NHSmail plus we would have incurred costs.

"One of the key benefits that we felt made the move to NHSmail essential, was that it provides us with a resilient solution with 24/7 support. 

"Additionally, our local IP telephony solution integrates with NHSmail really well.  Based on the entries in the NHSmail calendar, the telephony system automatically sets presence and  adjusts the voicemail message accordingly - for example if the calendar shows the user to be on holiday or in a meeting."

Overall, the migration project has been a successful one with minimal disruption to staff.  The benefits are clear - the PCT has avoided significant costs and now has a reliable, centrally managed email service, whilst all staff now use one system, simplifying workflows and enabling swift, secure exchange of information.