NHS.net email query

[jmak]

Not education, but I know a few of you work in the NHS. Someone I know works in a hospital which used to have its own Exchange based email but they're now migrating to NHS.net email. The issue is that they already have an NHS.net email account which they use working in a different NHS organisation. The hospital has told them they have to stop using the account for the other job and only use it for their hospital work. Clearly that won't work - the other organisation doesn't have their own email system - and it can't be uncommon. With the NHS being split there must be lots of staff working in different organisations.

 

I suggested creating two aliases for the single account - do you know if that's that possible in NHS.net mail? Is it O365 based, or is there a monstrous Exchange server somewhere? Who issues the accounts? I presume it's not going to be fixable by any individual hospital's IT support team?

 

Thanks

[timbo343]

Im sure it's possible to do, it's just talking to the right folk who can do this in the NHS technical team. I think the NHS.net system is O365 based from what my missus has described it looking like unless like you say its one massive exchange 2016 sat some where.

@googlemad may be able to answer this though.

[MatthewL]

NHS.net is all done from web admin type pages, there is/was no access to any back end bits of it and getting changes done were nearly impossible. An NHS.net address was there to follow you around the NHS so what you need to happen is the account would need to be marked as a leaver from 1 place and marked as a joiner at the other. The only other way would be to create a second account but defeats the object of NHS fail.

 

More and more trusts are moving away from local exchange to this which is part of the PSN too so its secure. There was talks of it been O365 based with NHSMail 2 but I'm not sure on the status of it. Think Vodafone currently have the contract for it so couldn't tell you.

[jmak]

An NHS.net address was there to follow you around the NHS so what you need to happen is the account would need to be marked as a leaver from 1 place and marked as a joiner at the other. The only other way would be to create a second account but defeats the object of NHS fail.

 

All makes sense - but not if you work in more than one NHS trust or have different roles in different places. In an organisation the size of the NHS, it would seem sensible to give some clue as to where you work in the address because there must be loads of doctors, nurses and managers with duplicate names.

 

Thanks for replying

[MatthewL]

You would normally have a primary employing trust and as a rule you would use that one, well that is how we did it. We only had 1 or 2 out of say 5000 users and those who were GP and Primary Care staff kept their display name as the GP one.

[googlemad]

As MatthewL said, we have very little control of nhs.net from an admin point of view! You could try the helpdesk on 0333 200 1133 / [email protected] but they're generally a bit rubbish in my personal opinion.

 

The scary thing is our hospital are currently in the middle of debating whether to stick with having an internal Exchange system or migrating across to entirely nhs.net too. When I say debating, I predict a 99.9% of ditching the Exchange system as it is 2010 and the costs of getting it updated and renewing maintenance etc will be astronomical!

[jmak]

I've just had a look through the Portal Admin Guide (publicly available, latest edition from Accenture), so I can see exactly what each level of admin user can do!

 

This situation does seem to be rare. I gather the conversation with the help desk so far has gone along the lines of

"you don't have an NHS mail account, so we need to set one up"

"I do"

"But we don't use NHS mail, so you can't have"

"But I have, it is...."

"Right, I've set up your new NHS mail account"

 

The thing I find most surprising is that there isn't more effort to make it easy to identify where someone works and what they do. The system uses aliases, so why not have the name of the trust in the alias?

 

Why don't people in IT support listen to users 🤔

[MatthewL]

As MatthewL said, we have very little control of nhs.net from an admin point of view! You could try the helpdesk on 0333 200 1133 / [email protected] but they're generally a bit rubbish in my personal opinion.

 

Agree with that, although it is 5 years since I had dealings with it had always been the same.