NHSmail first went live October 2004. There are over 260,000 NHSmail users registered for the national health service e-mail and directory service which is increasing every week with an average of one million messages sent or received across the NHSmail platform daily.
Since 2004 the technological and market environment has changed significantly. A number of opportunities for technology refresh were built into the original NHSmail contract. The move to Microsoft Exchange is the first of those. The cost of the transition will not exceed the existing programme budget. Costs have been controlled partly by the licences gained through the renewal of the enterprise agreement with Microsoft and partly through the reuse of existing infrastructure.
The move to Exchange will deliver new functionality and improved usability to NHSmail users. These include full mobile access via an extensive range of wireless devices, facilitating access to the many peripatetic workers in the NHS, full support for shared calendar use between doctors and managers, easier navigation between screens and functions, and the ability to share contacts between users. Exchange will also enable much faster recovery should any event impact one of the two data centres.
NHSmail carries out annual user surveys, and the Exchange-based service meets all of the most common requests for change reflected in survey results.
Other additional features are currently under consideration, such as instant messaging, which we believe will further increase the service appeal to NHS staff. As a result of this and the features described above, early contact with NHS trusts and NHS staff indicates that the transition to Exchange is likely to increase NHSmail user take-up above the current rate of 5,000 new users per month.