NSW Health calls time on GroupWise

NSW Health has started preparing the consolidation of all its disparate email systems into one Microsoft Exchange environment for some 200,000 end-users across the state government department with the big loser being Novell’s GroupWise.

To prepare for the migration, the health support services (HSS) infrastructure office within NSW Health is installing a centralised email archiving system based on Quest Archive Manager specifically for the GroupWise environments.

The new archiving solution will address “pressing GroupWise storage capacity concerns” and allow the historical GroupWise email to be centrally stored and accessed without a dependency on GroupWise itself.

HSS anticipates the new email archive system will be switched on in August 2011.

Last month the NSW Department of Health’s director of e-health and ICT strategy branch Ian Rodgers, said there is a renewed focus on the IT systems and infrastructure strategy which needed to be modernised to support the electronic medical records (EMR)[3] programs.

Although NSW Health has been planning to migrate to Exchange for some time, this move strikes another blow for Novell’s GroupWise which has to compete with the Microsoft juggernaut both on-premise and in the Cloud. Last year the Australian National Maritime Museum migrated off GroupWise to Exchange in the Cloud.

Many New Zealand organisations have made the move from GroupWise to Exchange in recent years, including ACC, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, and the Waikato District Health Board.

Novell was acquired by Attachmate last year.

- Additional reporting by David Watson