St Andrew's Healthcare

Improve communication and collaboration across the organisation, including patients where possible and external parties; deploy security and governance processes appropriate to a modern organisation; manage the migration of sensitive data to a new platform and exploit the benefits of Microsoft 365 and cloud in a complex operating environment

St Andrew’s Healthcare is proud of its patient recovery methods, based on personalised care packages that focus on physical and spiritual well-being and mental health. To support its approach, accessible communication with patients across the UK and sharing information with the NHS and other charities is critical.

St Andrew’s deployed on-premise Microsoft SharePoint 2010 & Shared Drives as its document management and collaboration platform in recent years. High volumes of data were causing the system’s response times to slow down; however, when Microsoft announced its end-of-life plans for SharePoint 2010, the management team had to decide on a new strategy.

The big challenge for St Andrew’s was managing the transition from SharePoint 10 and shared drives to deliver the communication, security and governance benefits of Microsoft 365. SharePoint 10 was already heavily used throughout the organisation and contained highly sensitive data. Therefore, the migration required careful management and expertise.

“CPS came out head and shoulders as the best partner for us. They listened to what we wanted and presented a proposal uniquely designed for our organisation, with patients’ needs at the forefront. The fact they were recognised by Microsoft as a leading UK Partner was also reassuring.”

Once appointed, CPS began reviewing and assessing existing St Andrew’s technology and provided a high-level solution and design plan to exploit Microsoft 365. The key to the plan was a structured approach to documents. Security and governance were the watchwords: ensuring that sensitive documents are managed and marked securely, for access only by the right people, with appropriate retention processes.

CPS was also tasked with designing a hub for Teams with Microsoft 365. The aim was to create a ‘single pane of glass’ view of the organisation, so employees could communicate and collaborate much more efficiently both internally and externally.