NHS Connecting for Health is planning to start "extended user acceptance testing" of the new NHSmail platform on Monday.
Will Moss, programme head of NHSmail, said 600 volunteers would trial the new system until 9 January, when the first live accounts are due to be migrated.
In July last year, it was announced that NHSmail would move from its Mirapoint platform to Microsoft Exchange 2007. Migration was due to start this autumn. But in September, CfH wrote to strategic health authorities saying it would be delayed until the New Year.
Moss told E-Health Insider he was confident migration would start on 9 January, although he said that given the scale of the project he would be “brave and foolish to say that is 100% guaranteed.”
If all goes to plan, the programme will be “moving 30,000 accounts that weekend and for the ten weekends thereafter.”
Moss said the programme had been working its way through more than 1,000 ready for operation tests and the new platform had already performed well with 100,000 simultaneous users – or “three times the number we normally have on the platform now.”
He also said that it had stood up to third-party testing and proved popular in smaller-scale user acceptance tests. Users found the new system easy to use, liked the look of it, and reported it was “quicker”, he said.
The 600-user trial should allow underlying assumptions about how people will use the new platform to be tested, as well as providing further feedback about usability. “I think we will know by the evening of the 15th whether people think it is good, bad or indifferent,” Moss said.
One hundred of the volunteers come from CfH, the other 500 from the NHS in Scotland and England. Volunteers will be put into a special ‘organisation’ on the platform for the trial. They will rejoin their own organisations as they come up for migration in the spring.
CfH says there has been a big pick up in the number of people registering for an NHSmail account over the past three months, with 9,000 registering in September, 12,000 in October and just over 11,000 in November. Moss said he thought the impending move to Microsoft Exchange was behind the increase in registrations.
The new platform promises to deliver a better email service, but also to improve access to task lists, calendars and other functions. It will also support a better service for the users of mobile devices.