On-Boarding Guidance

Background

All NHS organisations have the option to join the NHS shared tenant. As part of the NHS Collaboration Services Participation Agreement, organisations have two choices, either to move to the NHS shared tenant or run their own local offering. Currently, there are two ways of migrating to NHS from a destination platform, these are:

  • Self-managed on-boarding
  • Partner managed on-boarding

Planning

When an organisation is planning to on-board to the NHS.net Connect shared tenant they need initially to send an email to nhsdigital.nhsmailmigrations@nhs.net informing NHS England of their intentions and beginning engagement.

Thereafter the migration team can do some initial planning and analysis to determine whether the organisation will be capable of migrating themselves through the Self-managed on-boarding or whether the help of a partner would be better through the Partner managed on-boarding approach.

Identify which workloads need to be migrated and what services will form part of the NHS Shared Tenant:

  • SharePoint
  • Files
  • Teams
  • OneDrive
  • Other

Proposed Project Team Structure – Self-managed on-boarding

Proposed Project Team Structure – Partner managed on-boarding

 

Recommendation: consider and identify the following personnel in relation to your project whether self-migrating or with a migration partner:

  • Stakeholders – Recruitment and empowerment of sponsors and champions within your organisation.
  • Scenarios – Prioritisation and definition of success criteria for your organisation and associated workload.
  • Awareness – Implementation of communication campaign within your organisation and planning for post deployment notification.
  • Training – Educating end users and readying helpdesk resources.

Analysis 

If your planning team has decided to self-migrate, then you need to choose which tooling (applications) you will use to migrate your data to the NHS Shared Tenant.

Organisations can migrate to the NHS.net Connect shared tenant from their local environment via self-managed on-boarding where an organisation manages the project themselves from start to finish, using only internal resourcing and tooling procured by the organisation. NHS England does not provide tooling or technical support; this is undertaken solely by the organisation at their discretion. Self-managed on-boarding is most appropriate to organisations that have appropriately experienced technical resources within their own organisation. recommend that any self-managed on-boarding is project manager led, with senior management, and Primary and Local Administrator (LA/PLA) support and the appropriate technical resources in place. There are already several approved Applications which may suit your needs, please see the approved applications list for more information alternatively you will need to go through an application assessment.

If you have decided to work with a Partner instead of migrating your data yourself, you may find that a partner you work with is already approved to migrate to the NHS Shared Tenant (Approved Partners) alternatively the partner you wish to use will need to go through an assurance process. Please contact nhsdigital.nhsmailmigrations@nhs.net to start assurance process.

Whether self-migrated or partner led you will need to do an analysis of the data to be migrated to build a plan for the migration and submit the following form Onboarding Organisations.

Choose a handful of Test Sites (no more than 5 small sites) to migrate as a POC (proof of concept) to prove to your planning team the speed and success of data being migrated across to the Shared Tenant.  This will also provide you with some guidelines on time and effort.

Determine based on this information whether you are “Good to Go / Not Good to Go” (Go/No Go Decision). A final Go/No Go Decision before go-live of your project will need to come from NHS England via nhsdigital.nhsmailmigrations@nhs.net and is based on:

  • Pilot Results
  • Outstanding Issues
  • Migration List Completion
  • Licensing
  • Technical Readiness

Pre-Requisites

Supported Migration Application  

Assurance Process for New Partners

 

Once a supplier/partner contacts the NHS.net Connect Onboarding team (nhsdigital.nhsmailmigrations@nhs.net) on behalf of the Organisations/Trusts as their strategic partner the team need to determine if the supplier is already approved or if they are not approved yet to execute both Migrations/onboarding onto the NHS.net Connect Shared Tenant.

In order to get vetted to operate and execute batch migrations, onboarding and processes onto the NHS.net connect Shared Tenant the following process needs to be completed.

Partner Assurance Form

Local Administrator of the organisations who wishes to migrate with partner on behalf of that partner needs to provide additional information which comprises of this Partner Assurance Form to the onboarding team (nhsdigital.nhsmailmigrations@nhs.net):

  • Requirements and Use Cases related to the migration/onboarding
  • Migration Requirements
  • Understanding of Request for Change details and responsibility
  • Process for Communications to users
  • Impact Assessment

  • Reporting and Cadence of regular Update meetings
  • What Tooling will be used (Approved or Not Approved?)
  • If not approved – encourage the partner to fill in the Application Assessment Process as well
  • https://support.nhs.net/knowledge-base/request-an-application-assessment/

Level of access required by the Partner

  • Users Accounts
  • Configuration
  • Permissions (Related to workloads being migrated)
  • Migration / Onboarding approach (Scheduling and Batches)
  • Detailed list of Deliverables
  • All Testing Pre-Migration and planned Testing during migration (including Scope of testing, Scenarios, Performance, Migration Type, Defects etc .)

Links to:

Last Reviewed Date 05/02/2023
Updated on 05/02/2025

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