Vic Health boots Lotus Notes for Office 365

Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services has finally ditched Lotus Notes for email and calendar, ending two decade of reliance on the platform.

The year-long migration to Microsoft Office 365 was completed this month after the last of the department’s 11,500 staff jumped ship.

Chief information officer Steve Hodgkinson said in a LinkedIn post this week that the successful move had taken place over a 45-week period using a “structured division-by-division migration”.

He said the approach, which involved “over 300 training sessions and 120 executive meetings and adoption workshops”, was taken as the shift had spanned 63 locations across the state.

A ‘white glove’ approach for senior leaders was also adopted to help them become confident with the new tools.

Hodgkinson said that there were currently around 3900 active Teams users and 4200 active Skype users, though these were showing strong signs of month-on-month growth.

Source: Victoria DHHS

Staff also have access to Microsoft products Exchange, One Drive, SharePoint and Yammer under the O365 suite.

The shift to O365 has also already seen a reduction of more than 12 percent in the volume of daily email sent.

iTnews understands that Notes has been in place at the department since 1998, after it was adopted across much of the Victorian public service.

While Notes is no longer the go-to platform for email and calendar, other Notes-based applications are still holding out across the department and are expected remain there for some time.

Hodgkinson said moving away from Notes had emerged from a collaboration strategy developed with Microsoft during 2018 that intended to introduce eight new ways of working.

These include sharing and finding information, team and document collaboration, streamlined meetings and ideation.