Microsoft claims SharePoint success in NHS

Tags: A CfH EMIS iS Microsoft Monitor Portal

20 Oct 2005

Microsoft has announced that the number of users of its SharePoint collaboration and filesharing technology in the NHS has increased 25-fold since it signed an enterprise-wide agreement with Connecting for Health.

The software, which became heavily discounted to NHS users in May 2004 as part of a wider enterprise-wide agreement, allows organisations to share and control access to documents, as well as view calendars and create and control an intranet.

A spokesperson from the NHS team in Microsoft said: "We had about 2,000 users of SharePoint last summer. We're now onto 50-60,000. As soon as it's free, people begin to use it." He added that this now represented around 10% of NHS organisations using SharePoint.

Microsoft cited the example of Latham House General Practice in Lambeth in Melton Mowbray, the largest in the country, which is using SharePoint Portal Server on Citrix. "They went through all 150,000 of their clinical documents, stored them in EMIS and stored them in SharePoint." This made the records much easier to access and track.

Simon Hudson, general manager of CareLink, a Microsoft partner that carries out installations of SharePoint within the NHS, added: "Over a lifetime, an individual patient can acquire 8,000 piece of paper."

Microsoft also stressed that collaborative features can work well in an organisation where details are continually updated, saying that SharePoint's 'My Site' facilities can be used to proactively keep staff details on their organisation's intranet fresh.

"It's pulled straight out of Active Directory. We gave people the right to amend that data. If you give people the opportunity to correct their phone number without phine IT, then you have a great way of keeping your phone directory up-to-date."

Peter Duerden, applications developer at Southend NHS Trust, said of SharePoint: "It is used by nearly everybody in the organisation and has been invaluable in managing projects; the version control facility and central document storage has made project management much more efficient."

Southend NHS Trust had started using SharePoint before it became discounted for the NHS and is continuing to manage the intranet using the system - an intranet that includes small adverts and a staff forum: "This was to be open to everybody to say whatever they liked. People do feel free to say pretty much whatever they like about what's going on," said Duerden. "But it tended to get a clique of forum junkies who used it quite a lot."

Southend's intranet also featured an automatic referral system that notified social services whenever patients were to be discharged into their care. Duerden said that this was initially used to monitor late discharges and collect appropriate fines from social services. "If we had collected any of our fines, we would have earned ourselves about £250,000."

Microsoft stressed that the SharePoint discounts arranged with CfH are only valid if they are used for managing intranets and internal document management, and that extra charges applied if the software was being used on a public-facing basis.

Readers Comments

Not surprising, but not compelling

21 Oct 05 11:38

We evaluated Sharepoint and it's a better system for intranets than some out there. I can only attribute its "success" to a very concerted marketing drive by the likes of CareLink, combined with Microsoft's near-ubiquity in NHS productivity software. This makes it an easy (but not necessarily good) choice for managers looking to deploy collaborative environments.

In fact after a fairly extensive evaluation/standardisation process we discounted Sharepoint for projects of this nature. We use an open-source product called Plone (http://plone.org) that offers many of the same features as Sharepoint, some superior features (its accessibility is very good which helps with DDA compliance), and which happens to be free. Plone has some high-profile deployments in the NHS including the NPfIT website and extranet.

Unfortunately as an open-source project it lacks the marketing muscle of Microsoft and vendors like CareLink. This is a pity as it really is a better fit for at least some NHS projects.

NHS staff who want to know more can go to http://nww.users.plone.nhs.uk

- Shaun Hills Surrey Health Informatics Service shaun DOT hills AT nhs DOT net

(post edited by EHI)

How free is Plone?

21 Oct 05 16:36

Surely one of the selling points of Sharepoint is its ubiquity? In other words, it's relatively easy to find someone who knows Sharepoint, rather less so to find someone with Plone experience. So there will be some business benefits when it comes to staff recruitment and training overheads.

Plone is easy to use and well documented

sean.key@btinternet.com

22 Oct 05 11:44

Plone - www.plone.org was selected for the intranet and web site of Sussex Ambulance Service www.sussexambulance.nhs.uk. I worked there at the time and we chose it because:- - looked well supported by a large open source development community, new add-ons come out all the time - runs on windows servers - good documentation (at least 4 books published on how to use it) - FREE - can be integrated with relational databases e.g. MySQL, SQL server - easy to customise using its built-in management tools - user friendly content management - LDAP / Exchange integration possible I'd reccomend it, it worked for us. Only downside is that its written using Python so to do more detailed integration someone on the team has to learn that, but all generic jobs can be accomplished without needing to do that, and just a knowledge of CSS.

sean dot key at btinternet dot com

Valid point, but...

23 Oct 05 12:30

That's one of the selling points of Sharepoint, and of course there's no such thing as "free" really; there's always development time etc to be considered.

However, from the user perspective Plone is very easy to use. We've never had issues with user training. From the developer perspective it's easy to use providing the developer's been trained.

We sent all our developers to training. This is a one-off cost, so a single deployment may not be cheaper than a system like Sharepoint. But the marginal cost of multiple Plone deployments is much lower because you can re-use the same knowledge, code etc without incurring additional fixed costs like license fees. This works well in a shared services organisation like ours where we've done about ten deployments this year. - Shaun Hills Surrey Health Informatics Service

Training would have been useful

troman@sussamb.nhs.uk

24 Oct 05 10:52

I came to Plone with limited web skills (FrontPage, some CSS and the like) with the task of developing both an intranet and a website. Because of my circumstances at the time I was able to commit a few weeks to learning how Plone worked and eventually managed to produce something that looks fairly respectable and is coping with the demands we have placed on it so far.

The downside is that if you are trying to solve a particular problem instead of making a five-minute call to a support line you cna be faced with several hours of trawling through forums, etc. trying to find the solution. The plone users help forum, for example, has about 40,000 messages so even a narrow criteria search can result in hundreds of returns. The answer is almost certainly in there somewhere....but where?

From the user perspective Plone is easy to use and training content editors was a short and simple process. It can be a little 'dangerous' in the sense that it will allow deletion of even top-level folders without the warnings that one associates with commercial products.

To summarise, a reasonable solution, very accessible form the user perspective but training of the administrator is essential and would be an investment in the long run.

How free is Plone - 2

24 Oct 05 11:50

This is an interesting discussion. I think the point I wanted to make above is that whilst Plone might be a great option, people shouldn't let their antipathy to Microsoft get in the way of making the best decision for the benefit of the business. There are obviously pros and cons on both sides, and I'm certainly not anti-Plone.

However, it does seem quite sad that Connecting for Health signs an enterprise-wide agreement for Sharepoint, then chooses to use something else itself (likewise with Documentum).

I confess I'm inside the CFH tent, but I don't know what drove the decision.

Plone vs Sharepoint

sean.key@btinternet.com

24 Oct 05 12:21

In our decision to use Plone 'antipathy' to Microsoft wasn't a factor.

At the time (Dec 2004) I wasn't aware of a CfH enterprise agreement for Sharepoint. We wanted to have the capacity to create multiple sites and use the same CMS for our intranet and website, I understand that the CfH agreement doesn't cover web sites? Please correct me if this is wrong.

I tried evaluating Sharepoint for another Trust's Intranet in 2002 but the marketing material that supported it was so unclear about purpose, functionality and pricing that it put me off.

Before I left Sussex Ambulance Trevor (see above) had built another site to support a nationwide initiative to develop Emergency Care Practitioners (on NHSnet). That we could do this quickly and cheaply was a factor in our Trust winning the bid, and was due to our choice of an open source CMS and the effort put into learning the admin off of the web and from books by Trevor and our systems manager.

I'd be happy to mail you directly if you want to debate more, my address is above.

Freedom and antipathy

24 Oct 05 12:47

I absolutely agree a decision should be made based on business benefit. I'm not anti-Sharepoint; in fact we support a Sharepoint-based extranet for a stakeholder PCT.

But the flip side of the antipathy argument is: people shouldn't let the fact that Sharepoint's a Microsoft product get in the way of making the best decision for the business :-)

I can't speak for why CfH chose Plone, but I can say that Surrey HIS chose it for very objective, requirements-driven reasons including (but not limited to) cost.

- Shaun Hills Surrey Health Informatics Service