Softline announces the closure of the email migration project at Hospital Alemán, one of the longest-running healthcare institutions in Argentina. By implementing Office 365 and migrating email accounts to Exchange Online, users are more satisfied and this has significantly improved their productivity which is a benefit to the entire organization. The estimated productivity improvement is 20%.
With over 145 years of history, Hospital Alemán is one of the longest-running healthcare institutions in Argentina. It covers 55 medical specialties and serves 60,000 patients every month staffed by over 2,300 permanent employees and professionals.
“We had noticed our email system –Lotus Notes-was not enough to meet our users’ needs, with limited service availability and capacity, while we had to go at great lengths to run its maintenance and administration. These two factors led us to plan for a change and we had a clear idea in mind from the start that the best option for us was to take these services to “the cloud,” states Diego Waksman, Hospital Alemán CIO.
The first thought was to change only the email platform, which was the most troublesome resource. “We had to administer a whole infrastructure ‘on premise’, take care of the antivirus and manage spam, storage servers… and all of this was duplicated, as we had a redundant architecture. We weighed the option of implementing Gmail, but we finally opted for Microsoft’s communication and collaboration cloud platform”, adds the executive.
At Hospital Alemán we migrated all Lotus Notes-based email accounts to Exchange Online / Outlook accounts using Office 365. This action was met with great approval by the staff, as they are used to working on Office on their desktops, and this integration makes their everyday work easier,” explains Waksman.
The implementation links user accounts with the organization’s directory (Active Directory), which greatly simplifies its administration. “We now leave all of the platform management to Microsoft. This has a positive impact on our area and lets us focus on other kinds of organizational needs, for instance, on the development of a collaboration environment so that medical committees can arrange all of their information and communications on SharePoint portals, where a record of each event can be kept along with their related documents,” adds the CIO.
Assisted by the firm Perception Group, a Microsoft business partner with expertise in tools of this nature, hard work was performed on planning the stages of the project, towards efficient change management. The company also worked on the synchronization of Office 365 with the organization’s Windows Server, in order to cater for the automatic creation of email accounts whenever a new user is entered into the system.
The Enterprise agreement with Office 365 licenses E1 and E3 was managed with Softline. This company, together with Perception Group, provided advice with its Pre-Sales architecture team on the assessment and definition of the kind of licensing which fit best for Hospital Alemán.
“By implementing Office 365 and migrating email accounts to Exchange Online, users are more satisfied and this has significantly improved the way we work in the systems department. In a nutshell, this is a benefit to the entire organization. We have estimated a productivity improvement by 20%,” stated Diego Waksman, Hospital Alemán CIO.
“We no longer receive complaints about spam or virus issues. App integration simplifies every day work and this allows each position to respond faster, which is of great importance in an industry such as healthcare, with patients requiring immediate answers. It is a stable platform and this guarantees operational continuity. We at the IT department have more time now and this means we can do our job in better conditions”, concluded the executive.