The problem:
Over 3,000 staff at a leading mental health, learning disabilities and neurodiversity NHS Trust are now benefiting from a modern intranet experience thanks to Intelligent Decisioning. Leeds and York Partnership NHS Trust (LYPFT), who provide services mainly in Leeds but also across the North of England needed a robust and efficient intranet solution to replace their outdated SharePoint 2013 system. So, they turned to Intelligent Decisioning and their Mercury product to meet this need.
As existing users of the Intelligent Decisioning Mercury intranet product, they already realised the benefits of the Mercury offering which allows them to provide their staff with a high performing, fully functional intranet. At the heart of the current LYPFT intranet is a communications and document centre which LYPFT known as Staffnet, which was built in their private SharePoint 2013 installation.
SharePoint 2013 dropped out of support by Microsoft which meant that a new intranet platform was required, and the shared NHS England Tenancy was chosen as it would provide an evergreen platform, fully supported by Microsoft, that was available from anywhere, on any device, at any time and was a very cost-effective option for them. LYPFT realised that they needed to provide the same rich user experience that their current Mercury Intranet already delivered so they would need a Mercury Intranet inside of the shared NHS England tenancy. The shared NHS England Tenancy is a unique deployment of Microsoft 365 in the way that it hosts thousands of NHS organisations in a single tenant with the more typical model being to host one, or
two organisations in a tenant.
Moving from the feature rich, private, SharePoint 2013 based Mercury intranet meant that LYPFT would struggle to provide the enhanced experience and functionality that Mercury provides if they moved to a standard SharePoint Online intranet so the decision was made to migrate to Mercury inside of the shared NHS England tenant – great news for Intelligent Decisioning but also the start of a journey to approve the use of Mercury in the shared NHS England Tenancy
The solution
Intelligent Decisioning have been providing products and services to LYPFT for around 6 years, meaning the Trust were already fully aware of how Intelligent Decisioning and the Mercury Intranet and docCentrum Document Management solutions could support them in their move to the shared NHS England tenant and so we were asked to spearhead their move into the shared NHS England tenant.
While Mercury and docCentrum are well established products, the NHS England team, rightly guard the tenant against inappropriate software and so our products were put through a very stringent and very specific set of requirements before we could have the Mercury and docCentrum products added to the shared NHS England tenant.
Our senior developers worked closely with the NHS England IT Department to ensure that our products were fully compliant with the NHS requirements. Once the products were deployed and available in the share NHS England tenant, we got to work migrating documents to our own docCentrum solution while adding further tagging and metadata to ensure for a more user-friendly search facility across the LYPFT Intranet.
We also added the additional functionality to the Leeds and York, Mercury intranet thanks to the Power Platform. This functionality allowed us to request approval for documents before they can be viewed on the Leeds and York Intranet.
We rebuilt the Leeds and York Intranet in the shared NHS England tenant using our Mercury Intranet product. Some figures from our delivery:
1. 6 Hubs – created
2. 55 Sites – created
3. 596 Pages – redesigned and rebuilt
4. 170 News Articles (12 previous months) – migrated
5. 4000 documents – migrated
The team at ID have really proven themselves. They understand the needs of public sector intranets and have all the Microsoft SharePoint credentials. Their team worked alongside us throughout a long and hard process to achieve the results we needed. Our staff can now access the information they need from any device, anywhere, 365 days a year. Hence why we called our new site Staffnet 365. We are now being seen as trailblazers in the NHS provider intranet market for building our site within the NHS England SharePoint tenancy.
Oliver Tipper,
Head of Communications at LYPFT
The results
The deployment of the new, modern Staffnet, with its communications and document management centre, to the shared NHS England tenant has been a resounding success. Leeds and York now have a reliable, efficient, and user-friendly intranet solution that meets their needs now and in the future. Leeds and York are now able to retire old, unsupported hardware and software, resulting in cost savings which can be used to benefit other areas of the Trust.
Mercury has enabled Leeds and York to produce an engaging, easy to use, Intranet with simplified navigation to allow their users easy access to their content. Content owners are enjoying the ease of editing and producing content from within the Online platform. Documents are now available and classified by superusers before being reviewed and approved by document owners.
During the delivery of the intranet, we discovered several custom forms and departmental processes that were reviewed and converted into the Microsoft digital forms and workflows Power Platform. Several forms were converted to PowerApps, including a core process ‘On Call Logs’, and these forms were made available through the integration points between Mercury and the Power Platform. Additionally, docCentrum improved the information governance and version control around policies and procedures, addressing another high-risk but even higher footfall area.
Conclusion
This case study demonstrates the effectiveness of Intelligent Decisioning’s Mercury product in meeting the complex needs of a large health organisation. It also underscores the importance of thorough testing and certification in ensuring the successful deployment of such a solution.
With the move to the shared NHS England tenant and the modern SharePoint platform, Leeds and York have set themselves up to enable the future enhancements that Microsoft are releasing including the future integration of Microsoft Copilot which will assist their staff to work smarter and more efficiently.
The successful delivery of this project has further cemented the relationship between Leeds and York Partnership NHS Trust and Intelligent Decisioning.
