York, 15th April – Carelink, the health division of ioko, and provider of IT services to over 240 NHS clients and other healthcare-related organisations, is to deploy the latest version of Core Site, the leading website solution for the NHS, to four additional NHS Trusts: Mid Essex PCT, Lincolnshire Teaching PCT and Telford & Wrekin PCT and Norfolk & Waveney Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust.

With this release, Carelink are building on the success of their existing NHS Core Site solution used by 12 NHS organisations. Core Site II is based on the very latest technology from EPiServer (www.episerver.com), one of the leading Content Management Systems in Europe.

Carelink’s NHS clients have typically been looking for a website solution that is:

• Simple to use for editors and approvers to create and approve content without the need for web developer skills
• Adopts NHS design guidelines
• Attractive, with a clean design and with the ability to customise the homepage look & feel to provide a unique identity for each individual Trust

In addition, many NHS customers are looking for ability to automate the publishing of key documents from their intranet site to their internet websites. In particular, there has been a significant recent increase in the demand for websites that can provide integration with intranets developed using MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). MOSS is the leading solution for intranet and extranet use within the NHS due in part to Trusts’ leveraging the investment Connecting For Health (CFH) have made in Microsoft software under the Microsoft NHS Enterprise Agreement (which was re-signed in 2007).

Other key areas of interest have been the ability for non-technical authors to rapidly create online forms, surveys and quick polls with the ability to store the results in the database and extract the data when needed into tools such as Microsoft Excel.

“We chose NHS Core Site because of its rich functionality, its scalability and its easy integration with other applications such as SharePoint which will allow future redevelopment of the trust's intranet site. Core site has also been deployed to a large number of other NHS organisations and has been tailored specifically for the NHS which was a big deciding factor.”

Martin Cresswell, Communications Consultant, Mid Essex PCT

Core Site provides a strategic website platform that enables NHS Trusts to devolve publishing to individual departments and content owners. This frees up IT staff to deal with more specific IT related problems and provide a more efficient service. Running on the Carelink hosting platform provides N3 and internet access to the content.

“Out of the box NHS Core Site II provides everything a trust needs for a great website, including search, forms, site maps and much more, without over-investing in money or people. When they are subsequently ready to do more with their site they already have an enterprise scale CMS to work from. ”

Simon Hudson, General Manager, Carelink