Season’s greeting to one and all. Another year is coming to pass and there is no sign of a slow down in the pace of change in the NHS. Carelink is working closely with Microsoft and our other partners to bring new solutions to market to help our clients with the challenge change always represents. As ever we seek to provide honest, unbiased advice, practical solutions and competitive pricing.

We are working closely with several new partners. With the launch of ioko Connect we have teamed up with Intercall, the world’s largest audio conferencing provider, to offer audio conferencing alongside our other collaboration tools. As we deploy more information portals we are strengthening our relationship with Interse to help provide their excellent iBox metadata and search technology to the NHS. We are working alongside D2i with the UK roll out of Groove (also part of the ioko Connect range) and, as always, closely with Microsoft, QA Training, Sun and Vignette. We will continue to look for complementary technologies which we can direct our clients towards; whether we sell these or not.

Simon Hudson

simon.hudson@ioko.com

Services and Solutions Update

NHS Core Site

As mentioned in the last bulletin, one of Carelink’s newer product lines is the NHS Core Site. This solution is built around a leading content management application and provides a website that looks good, meets NHS guidelines and is quick and easy to maintain by non technical people; whilst providing many advanced features to both authors and visitors to your website. The outstanding ease of use and vast range of features has created a considerable amount of interest since it addresses an increasing need for powerful content management within NHS organisations. NHS Core Site is extremely competitively priced, providing an all inclusive solution.

ioko Connect

This is our newest suite of products, which launched officially at the Managing the Market conference in November. Again, there has been a huge amount of interest from the NHS community. ioko Connect is a set of technology solutions that gives you the power to work together with colleagues, customers and suppliers, no matter where you are. It enables you to hold online meetings, training, organise events, projects, case conferences and provides integrated collaboration.

A major benefit across the suite is its ease of use and overall simplicity, so people quickly get to grips with using it regularly. It has a familiar Microsoft interface with deep integration with Microsoft Office and Outlook. Since ioko Connect is largely based around Microsoft products, it is well supported, with additional capabilities under development.

We use the full ioko Connect suite ourselves and use ioko Connect – Live itself as the tool for running demonstrations; which we can do with only a few minutes notice in most cases – call us and test us if you don’t believe it. We have developed special NHS pricing for this service; we anticipate that an annual license will pay for itself after only 2 uses in many cases (in fact when we started using ioko Connect – Live internally we recovered the full annual cost in just 6 weeks) For more information on ioko Connect, please click here

We intend to run an Architectural Design Seminar focused on Real Time Collaboration at Microsoft House, Reading in February 2006. More details will be given on this nearer the time, but let us know if you are especially interested.

East Riding Primary Care Trust intranet competition

Carelink provides a range of services and applications to Hull and East Riding Health Informatics Service (HERHIS). This includes application support, website design, procurement of an intranet/internet site and a cardiac rehabilitation site implementation. Recently, East Riding PCT decided to adopt the intranet tool provided via HERHIS for its staff. To promote this they created a competition to determine what their intranet should be called. This was a very effective idea to let all the staff know of the imminent arrival of the intranet as well as getting the whole organisation involved. Carelink were happy to provide the prizes for this ‘Name the Intranet’ competition. First prize were vouchers to a well known retail chain outlet with Carelink/ioko goodies being given to runners up. The competition runs from November through to the week before Christmas.  Winners are to be announced in the staff newsletter, which has a circulation of approximately 1200 people, and on the Staff Focus home page of their intranet site. The ‘www.eastridingpcts.nhs.uk’ site itself will have an nww intranet version for internal staff and a www version for public viewing. For more information of East Riding PCT please click here

Thames Valley Strategic Health Authority SharePoint installation

We are pleased to announce that Thames Valley SHA have decided to implement one of our Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server based solutions. They need an application that can act as a single point of reference for projects and documents across all the counties that make up the SHA. The 6 week implementation is presently underway. As well as implementation, Carelink will also provide comprehensive training so that administrators and all users will be fully competent. For more information of Thames Valley SHA please click here

‘Extending SharePoint for the NHS’ seminars

SharePoint has grown enormously within the NHS over the last 12 months. Prior to the inclusion of SharePoint Portal Server in the NHS enterprise agreement there were around 2500 NHS users, while that number now exceeds 60,000.

As the leading provider of SharePoint to the NHS, we held another pair of seminars back in October, in conjunction with Microsoft, entitled ‘Extending Sharepoint for the NHS’. These followed a similar format to our successful ‘SharePoint in the NHS’ seminars that were held in April 2005; the two seminars were held a few days apart at Microsoft House in London and ioko’s main headquarters in York. They were intended to inform NHS organisations about the additional uses that SharePoint could have on their organisation, with emphasis on plug in or custom solutions, as well as providing case studies from trusts already using this important technology. Our thanks also must go to the following speakers who made these seminars a very enjoyable and informative couple of days: Richard Collinge (Airedale NHS Trust), Peter Duerden (Southend Hospital NHS Trust), Ben Knox (National Treatment Agency), Dan Thomsen (Interse), Ray Jordan (D2i), Gareth Hall (Microsoft) and Emma Darley (Microsoft). The seminars were fully booked and feedback from both showed how delegates appreciated the blend of technical and non-technical presentations and left the seminars with much more knowledge and confidence of the product than before. All the presentation slides from these seminars are available on the NHS SharePoint User Group. We anticipate running further seminars next year.

NHS SharePoint User Group

The NHS SharePoint User Group has also grown. The site is centred on a secure SharePoint site allowing interactivity amongst its members, exchange of documents and ongoing identification of needs and features, plus providing information or links to a wide range of SharePoint content. The number of registered NHS users is fast approaching 200. We thank you for your input and contribution to the site, please keep this up. The site is continually improving as a result and has recently been upgraded with an enlarged Sandpit area (where you can try out being a full SharePoint web developer) and extra subsections i.e. on real time collaboration and content management systems. We always welcome new NHS members to the site. So, if you would like membership please email Raghunath.Pai@ioko.com with the subject line ‘NHS SharePoint User Group registration request’. There’s no cost, no obligation, and no advertising or covert commercial stuff. And, “no, you don’t have to be a Carelink customer to have access to the user group, it’s there for anyone from the NHS” For more details on the SharePoint User Group site please click here

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