Belfast Trust Puts its Faith in Kainos for Major SharePoint 2010 Portal Consolidation and Upgrade Project

London - June 19th, 2012 Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, one of the largest healthcare trusts in Europe, has engaged Kainos to provide a single, integrated cross-discipline collaboration portal based on Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Kainos, a Microsoft Gold Partner, was selected to work with the Trust to develop a new corporate intranet as a means to consolidating and upgrading a series of disparate intranet sites which the Trust had inherited. Belfast Health and Social Care Trust was formed in 2007 following the merger of Belfast City Hospital, the Royal Hospitals, the Mater Hospital, Greenpark Healthcare Trust, North and West Belfast and South and East Belfast HSS trusts. Initial attempts to migrate the various intranets to SharePoint 2010 had proved problematic, as the Trust required more from the platform than was available out of the box. Belfast Trust selected Kainos for the contract based on its known credentials with Microsoft SharePoint, and its strong track record of similar work across the public sector. Says the Trust's Director of IT and Telecommunications, Paul Duffy, 'We knew of Kainos's reputation in the market: their strong SharePoint experience and the recent tenders they have won with other government bodies. This gave us the confidence they were the right people for the job.' Kainos is providing specialist design and technical services, adapting SharePoint 2010 to the specific needs of the Trust, and ensuring a professional and user-friendly look and feel. The project, which involves migrating more than 20,000 users to the new consolidated SharePoint portal, serves two main purposes - providing a public 'shop front' in the Trust to reinforce Belfast Trust's identity, and also a collaboration facility to aid communication and team-working across internal teams such as laboratories, pharmacy departments and care-givers. 'Our goal is to provide effective access to the means to manage, update and disseminate information,' Paul explains. 'We wanted to start to move beyond shared drives to a situation where staff can proactively manage their content and calendars more effectively.' In a further development, the Trust will be looking to expand the facility with an integrated electronic document management system, which may be fronted by the SharePoint portal. 'Kainos is the ideal technology partner. They have provided excellent design and technical skills and are extremely good at sticking to delivery dates,' Paul concludes. 'The reputation of their staff is second to none.' Commenting on the partnership, Sheila McWilliams, business unit head at Kainos, says, 'It is a privilege to have yet another high-profile public sector project entrusted to us. This critical work with Belfast Trust further reinforces the value our highly experienced and deeply skilled teams bring to our customers, and we look forward to seeing the relationship develop.'