NHS Digital has completed its migration of 2.1 million NHSmail mailboxes to Microsoft’s Exchange Online platform.
It described the move as the world’s largest ever enterprise email migration and an important step towards deploying new digital tools and services for a joined up NHS.
The work began in August 2020 and was carried out by the collaboration services team with Accenture and Microsoft, with most users experiencing no interruption in service. Around 22,000 NHSmail accounts were moved to the cloud every evening and 83,000 over each weekend.
NHS Digital said Exchange Online will enable frontline staff to communicate more effectively, reduce administration and improve patient safety. It will automatically update NHSmail to the latest version of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite, building on the deployment of Teams at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Richer and secure
Its chief executive Sarah Wilkinson said: “The migration of NHSmail to Exchange Online has enabled us to provide staff across the NHS with a mail system which is functionally richer, more secure and lower cost.
“We have also deployed a Microsoft hybrid implementation of Office 365 to the NHSmail platform, which is allowing NHS organisations to provision O365 services much faster, integrate with the existing NHSmail identity, and collaborate more easily.
“These additional Office 365 services build on the deployment of Microsoft Teams, which we rolled out at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and is currently used to send almost 1 million messages across the NHS every day.”
Image from psd.scot.nhs.uk, Open Government Licence
