Microsoft has announced that the number of users of its SharePoint collaboration and file sharing 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 November 2004 as part of the wider Enterprise Agreement, allows organisations to share and control access to documents, as well as view calendars and provides the basis for a powerful 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, observed: "Over a lifetime, an individual patient can acquire 8,000 piece of paper. Effective means for managing this information are essential; paper just doesn't cut it anymore."

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 give people the right to amend that data. If you give people the opportunity to correct their phone number without involving 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 staff small ads 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 gave acess to 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 chosen to collect all the fines, we would have created an income of about £250,000."

Microsoft stressed that the SharePoint discounts arranged with the NHS 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.