Carelink – Bigger and better than ever

Carelink Bulletin is now in its 4^th issue and things have never looked better. The good news for us is we have a number of interesting new partners we are working with including the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the National Workforce Project, Airedale NHS Trust, Southend NHS Trust and Mid Essex Hospital Services.

Of more interest, I suspect, are the introduction of a new content management system which has allowed us provide our NHS Core site at a far more accessible price 9and it offers many new features too).

We have also added a range of new collaboration offerings, based on Microsoft Live Meeting and Live Communication Server. We saved over a thousand pounds in the first 2 weeks of using Live Meeting and that was with just 5 user accounts, so it seemed obvious that we should be helping the NHS realise equivalent savings.

Finally it’s that time of year. On the one hand everyone seems to be taking their holidays, which makes for ‘interesting’ times, on the other it means that the autumn events season is about to start, with eHealth and the Microsoft CIO Summit in September and two more  Carelink SharePoint seminars in October.

As ever, call us if you need anything.

Simon Hudson

simon.hudson@ioko.com

Services and Solutions Update

NHS Core Site

Recently we have been working on upgrading our the NHS Core Site solution. We have been concerned for some time that the cost of providing a powerful content managed web site has been prohibitively high for many organisations, yet a survey of NHS web sites has shown that a great proportion of them would benefit from an upgrade in order to meet accessibility guidelines, provide good FOI publishing, improve aesthetics and to greatly improve maangemeability. We had already developed NHS Core Site to address these needs, especially to replace existing sites built in FrontPage, Dreamweaver or other early generation tools. The challenge was finding an acceptasble price point. We have introduced an additional underlying cms technology which allows us to offer NHS Core Site on an ASP basis at a surprisingly low price, as a full and flexible Enterprise option at less than half the previous cost, while retaining the power and scalability of the Regional cms version that allows groups of trusts to share.

NHS Core Site removes the need for technical and design skills associated with conventional web publishing, such as formatting and page layout, and instead allows authors to fully focus on what they need to – the content that they are producing.

For more information on NHS Core Site, please click here

Service Desk for Health

As noted in previous bulletins, Carelink, in conjunction with our ITIL implementation partner – Partners in IT - now offers Service Desk for Health. Our solution, which is compatible with NPfIT and LSP standards, is based on HP OpenView and provides NHS organisations with both a full ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) environment and a hosted Service Desk that includes essential tools such as a configuration management database (CMBD). You retain all the power of a local implementation, wrapped in a full, validated ITIL approach, resilient hardware, a reassuring SLA and a very fast implementation timetable, but without the burden of managing the additional IT systems involved. The economies of scale of this approach are substantial. We can extend this with our other infrastructure services including Microsoft Systems Management Server and Microsoft Operations Manager

For more information on Service Desk for Health, please click here.

Real Time Collaboration

There are an increasingly interesting range of collaboration tools available from Microsoft. These include Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), Groove, Live Communications Server (LCS), Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC) and Office Live Meeting (OLM). We are able to offer solutions based on all of these technologies.

• Our WSS offering provides a full hosted service with internet and NHSnet/N3 connectivity and we can provide WSS development where extended functionality is desired (including our specialist web parts for enhanced navigation, adding metadata to search results, providing advanced webpart linking or site redesigns using FrontPage). Where offline and peer to peer collaboration is needed we support Groove via our partnership with D2i. Groove integrates with SharePoint and allows ad hoc workspaces to be created without the need for a central server.
• We have recognised the power of Instant Messaging, Presence and User centred communications for some time and now  offer full Live Communications Server (LCS) installations to our clients. We advise on appropriate infrastructure, security and policies and have personal experience of managing transatlantic and multisite UK projects with this type of technology, resulting in many thousands of pounds of savings. With the increasing need to keep teams connected wherever and whenever we see LCS as a key technology for the next 12 months.
• Finally, we already use Office Live Meeting in-house to support projects and other client activities. Unlike LCS, there is no need for local servers and no need for each user to have software installed (other than a browser plug-in that can be quickly downloaded when needed). As with LCS the cost savings can be substantial and considerable. Carelink can quickly provide NHS organisations with Live Meeting accounts so that they can collaborate with groups within or outside their organisation and run presentations and training sessions. Not only are the savings in travel costs compelling but we find that projects move so much more swiftly when you can get the team ‘together’ in an hour or two for a rich meeting rather than trying to find a time when everyone can physically travel to a central meeting room.

SharePoint QuickStart

With our continued focus on SharePoint the Quickstart offer we initated at HC2005 has become a standard offer.  QuickStart is the fastest way to get started with the power and flexibility of SharePoint Portal Server. This special service gets you started, providing expert installation, basic configuration and administrator familiarisation.

QuickStart allows you to begin to understand the benefits of this technology, such as:

• Document versioning and document check-in and check-out
• Lists and views
• Picture libraries
• Calendar monthly, weekly and daily views
• List of items, including HTML pages, documents and images
• Support for list and site templates
• Support for web parts and web part pages
• Rapid page and site creation

SPS is the best choice for a powerful NHS intranet, document management environment or Business Intelligence Portal.

For more details on Carelink’s SharePoint QuickStart offer, please click here

Training Course with QA

Training, as we all know, is an essential component of creating a successful project. To be honest we have not been that great at providing it to our clients (but then we are a technology company not a training company). To address this we have formalised our partnership with QA, one of the worlds foremost technology training companies. We offer access to QA’s standard and bespoke training courses at a substantial saving for the NHS. There are a vast range of courses in both technical and business training, including:

• End User Application/Desktop
• Project and Programme Management
• Management and Personal Development
• IT Services Management
• Business System Development and Testing
• Application Development and Programming
• Web Technologies and Authoring
• Messaging and Collaboration
• Databases
• IT Security
• Operating Systems, Infrastructure and Hardware
• Communications and Internetworking

For more information on these courses, please click here

Events

eHealth

Carelink is once again exhibiting at eHealth at the London West Convention Centre. This two day exhibition is being held on the 27^th to 28^th September and in conjunction with two other conferences - Clinical Information Systems and Electronic Records. We will be exhibiting our usual expertise and solutions in areas such as content managed web sites, powerful interactive intranets and information portals, document management, online collaboration tools (real time and document driven), hosting to both Internet and NHSnet/N3 and secure access technologies. Come visit us at stand 35 in the ‘Champagne Suite’ hall to talk face-face to see how we are able to assist you in your IT needs.

For more information on eHealth, please click here

SharePoint Seminars

Due to popular demand and after our hugely successful ‘SharePoint in the NHS’ seminars that were held in conjunction with Microsoft in April 2005, we are holding two further seminars entitled ‘Extending SharePoint in the NHS’. These are being held in London (18^th October) and in York (20^th October), hopefully you should find one of the two locations quite convenient to get to. The seminars are designed to give you practical and insightful advice on SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and its related technology. You will learn how SharePoint can be used and extended to help manage information-based business challenges in the NHS and see what it can offer in terms of document management, team collaboration, business intelligence and communication tools. We think it is essential to share the experiences of your peers and facilitate discussion around how they are using it to deal with challenges within the NHS, hence we have several invited speakers from the NHS. This will be backed up by technical advice from Carelink and our partners, giving you information on solutions, webparts and plug-in technologies to extend the standard features. An we promise not to try top sell to you during the event (see us later for that if you want)

For more details on these seminars (including agenda and registration instructions), please click here