On the move: Mid Essex migrates from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007

Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust recently migrated its 3,000 staff from the communications platform, Microsoft Exchange 2003, to the newer version, Microsoft Exchange 2007. Mike Casey, director of IT at the trust explains how it planned the migration and the benefits it has seen.

Mid Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust provides acute services to more than 360,000 people living in Chelmsford, Maldon and Witham. It is also home to a regional plastic surgery service, which covers around 3.2 million people, and provides a regional burns service for almost 10 million people.

It has 3,000 staff working across six different sites; and almost all of them use email for reasons that range from exchanging clinical information to simply keeping n touch with colleagues. In other words, for the trust and the people who work for it, good email access is of paramount importance.

Building firm foundations

The trust’s email relies on Microsoft Exchange, a communications platform that can also be used for messages, calendars, contacts, tasks and other collaboration tools. Until 18 months ago, it was using Microsoft Exchange 2003, but then it decided to migrate to Microsoft Exchange 2007.

One reason was that the trust had started working its way through an early version of the NHS Infrastructure Maturity Model (NIMM), which helps NHS organisations to benchmark their IT performance and prioritise future investments.

IT director Mike Casey said the migration was part of the trust’s quest to reach the highest level of maturity – level four - by the end of March 2010, while pursuing its vision for achieving foundation status.

Once the trust had decided that it wanted to proceed with the migration in March last year, it called in Quest Software, a company that specialises in helping organisations to get the most out of their Windows infrastructure, databases and applications.

The trust needed Quest to help it with the challenge of extracting 3,000 staff from the existing Essex Shared Services Agency (ESSA) infrastructure to a completely new domain.

“For most of our deployments and upgrades we implement a rapid deployment model,” said Casey, “but this time it wasn’t quite so simple.” The trust decided to use Quest Migration Manager for Active Directory and NDS Migrator to “smooth things out.”

Planning, doing

It took about two months to plan the migration. A team of 10-20 people from Microsoft, Quest and the trust’s IT team were involved in the project, with two Quest consultants working fulltime on site.

Because the trust had to complete the project within a live clinical environment, it then chose to do the migration over a single weekend. This was the quietest time in all departments, except for Accident and Emergency.

Casey added: “After all the planning, we built a virtual quarantine environment where we created a network inside a network to test the new domain. We sat back and thought about everything that could go wrong and continued to test.

“We even invited Microsoft to come in and break the system - and when it was clear that they couldn’t we were comfortable to go-live.”

Joe Baguley, chief technology officer for Quest in Europe, said that Quest had already migrated around 300,000 user accounts within the NHS alone, so it was quietly confident that the Mid Essex migration would run smoothly.

He said: “The atmosphere was fairly relaxed. In any migration we put a huge emphasis on the pre-migration planning work and always build in several testing phases to ensure we have all our bases covered. By the time we made the switch we knew it would work and that we wouldn’t have any significant challenges.”

More secure, more benefits

The benefits of the migration are now being seen trust wide. Casey says improved security from using a single domain has been the key result. Creating and editing user profiles can also be completed in around 10 minutes, when previously it could take up to a week. Evidently, this has saved a large amount of time and resource.

Casey continued: “We now have a rock solid mail system, which is easy to manage and a comfortable enterprise product, we went past the 1 million email mark and it did not fail in any way.”

The migration also paved the way for more advanced services, enabling the trust’s many mobile clinicians to log in from home using Outlook Web Access and provide medical advice to patients wherever they are.

The reliability of the system has also been improved as the Microsoft Exchange environment is split across five clustered servers on a collapsible network core, which means if there is problem with one network the trust can reboot to network switches.

Casey concluded: “As a result of the migration we now have an environment that is strong enough to take more powerful products in order to promote a positive message and allow us to be seen as an innovative trust.”