NHS Digital has successfully completed the world’s largest ever enterprise email migration after moving 2.1 million NHSmail mailboxes over to Microsoft’s Exchange Online platform.

The large-scale migration marks an important step towards creating a joined-up NHS and equipping frontline services with the latest digital tools and services available.

NHS Digital says that moving to Microsoft’s Exchange Online platform will enable frontline staff to communicate more effectively and support them as they continue to respond to the pandemic - reducing the burden of administration and ultimately improving patient safety.

The work, which began in August 2020, was undertaken in collaboration with Accenture and Microsoft and completed today with the vast majority of users experiencing no interruption in service. Approximately 22,000 NHSmail accounts were moved over to the cloud every evening and 83,000 accounts across each weekend.

One of the benefits of NHSmail now being cloud based is it will automatically update to the latest version of Microsoft’s Office 365 collaboration suite, so users will always have access to the latest tools and capabilities. It also enables NHSmail to now provide Office 365 services, building on the deployment of Microsoft Teams, which was first deployed at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and is currently used to send almost 1m messages across the NHS every day.

Sarah Wilkinson, chief executive of NHS Digital, said: “The migration of NHSmail to Exchange Online has enabled us to provide staff across the NHS with a mail system which is functionally richer, more secure and lower cost.

“We have also deployed a Microsoft Hybrid implementation of Office 365 to the NHSmail platform, which is allowing NHS organisations to provision O365 services much faster, integrate with the existing NHSmail identity, and collaborate more easily. These additional Office365 services build on the deployment of Microsoft Teams, which we rolled-out at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and is currently used to send almost 1m messages across the NHS every day.”