Integrating ESR with Active Directory at Warrington & Halton

In 2001 staff at the former North Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust were faced with manually creating and maintaining user and e-mail accounts for every employee. The Trust made the decision to implement Cloud21s Directory Manager software to automate user account administration using data from the Trust’s HR system.

"In a business operational environment that involves a considerable rate of staff changes the resource effort required and cost involved in ensuring that computer and information access is appropriate and timely is very high. Integration and automation between ESR and Active Directory has delivered a considerable reduction in this effort and cost and at the same time increase the reliability and security in our account management procedures." - Steve Nicholson Network Manager

Initial aims were to:

• Create user accounts before new employees start to avoid unnecessary delays
• Manage user security group membership according to the employee’s department
• Ensure employee name changes were applied to Active Directory consistently and in a timely manner
• Provide a single resilient management point for the directory
• Deliver cost savings and productivity gains.

"The software has saved us so much time and is now such an integral part of my working life that I can't imagine being without it."Tracie Waterfield - IT Systems Engineer

Long-term partnership

Since the initial meeting in 2001, Cloud21 has continued to work in partnership with what has now become Warrington & Halton NHS Foundation Trust.

With ongoing product development from Cloud21, the Trust continues to benefit from further enhancements and additional functionality, including:

• Greatly increased flexibility in managing Exchange mailboxes, home folders, group membership and user attributes
• Direct integration with the NHS Electronic Staff Records (ESR) via the Generic Outbound Interface (GOI). New and changed staff records result in the direct creation or update of Active Directory accounts and Exchange mailboxes
• NHSMail synchronization in conjunction with an NHSmail ‘connector’ submitting data to NHSmail and downloading addresses, propagating them to corresponding Active Directory accounts and uploading to ESR.
• Introduction of a self-service web portal for ease of administration
• Ability to include non-ESR staff in the user provisioning process
• Extended email notifications
• Deployed as Windows Services

As a result of using Directory Manager, Warrington and Halton Hospitals have benefitted from significant improvements to streamlining the process of user account administration. What was once a full-time job can now be easily managed by a 0.5 WTE, enabling the IT team to focus on more important matters.

Improve staff experience and reduce the admin burden on your IT teams with Directory Manager. Learn more