South, Central and West Commissioning Support Unit: NHSmail case study

DCB1596, formerly known as SCCI1596, requires publicly funded organisations to only use accredited email services. This means organisations must either join NHSmail or ensure their in-house email solutions are securely accredited.

To comply with this standard, South, Central and West Commissioning Support Unit (SCW CSU) initiated a project to migrate 600 staff email accounts from their local email exchange service to NHSmail.

SCW CSU chose NHSmail in order to benefit from using a consistent communication tool both internally and externally, improving links with other health and social care NHSmail users. 

Rather than pay for a managed or supported migration, SCW CSU opted to self-migrate their users. This is free for organisations to carry out as NHSmail is a centrally-funded service. The only cost implication for SCW CSU was internal resource.

This suited their complex organisational structure, which included disparate systems at different stages of maturity. 

A carefully planned migration approach, that enabled control and flexibility, was, therefore, needed.

You can find out more about how SCW CSU self-migrated across to NHSmail in their detailed case study which includes:

• benefits of self-migration
• approach to self-migration
• lessons learnt
• key stakeholders
• resources used to support the migration
• feedback from users migrated to NHSmail