Trust-side migration support for the Unite Programme
The Unite Programme is a national consolidation effort, moving NHS organisations out of locally held Microsoft 365 tenants and into NHS.net Connect - the shared, centrally managed NHS tenant that many people still know as NHSmail, nhs.net, or simply the central or shared tenant.
Accenture, as service integrator to NHS England and the NHS.net Connect team, delivers the migration of Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams and Groups. That work is centrally funded and it is done well.
What sits underneath it is the part that determines whether the move lands cleanly, and it remains your organisation’s responsibility: identity mapping and naming conventions, mailbox and archive remediation, sharing-permission planning, Power Platform and Microsoft Forms self-migration, sensitivity-label decisions, and specialist workloads the programme does not carry.
We close that gap - augmenting or leading your team, delivering the trust-side responsibilities while the programme’s scope remains entirely intact.
Where we fit
The programme is templated by design. It has to be, in order to work fairly across every organisation in the country. Few NHS organisations are templated, which is where the friction comes from.
The operating model is explicit that the Business Relationship Manager assigned to your migration advises, guides and coordinates. Your organisation decides, configures and signs off. That distinction matters, because the work of deciding and configuring is real, it is substantial, and it lands on teams who still have a service to run.
We are the resource that does it.
The four stages, and what we do at each
Every organisation moves through the same four stages: Front Door, then Readiness, then Engine, then Hypercare.
We can join at any point, but the earlier we start the more we can influence. Most of our engagements begin at Front Door, because that is where the evidence which unblocks a business case is produced, and where decisions made early stop becoming blockers later. From there we carry the trust-side workload through Readiness, into the Engine cutover, and out through Hypercare to closure.
| Stage | Delivered centrally | What we carry |
|---|---|---|
| Front Door | Discovery scripts, information pack survey, service and engineer accounts | Running the scripts natively, tracking acceptance per script, and putting real numbers under your business case |
| Readiness | Scope confirmation, beta, pilot, NHS.net Connect resource creation, change freeze, and your first named BRM | User and licence decisions, information governance and DPIA input, permissions remediation, cohort communications, and the migration input pack |
| Engine | Initial copy, deltas, simulation weekend, go/no-go and switchover | Command, control and validation, with a rehearsed cutover designed around live clinical services |
| Hypercare | Two weeks of elevated support, L3 incident management, closure report | Floor-walking coordination, the validation report and project closure |
We work inside the stage gates, submit the native evidence packs, and never repeat - or charge for - work you have already done.
Four service pillars
01 · Discovery and migration decisions
Structured discovery across mailboxes, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, integrations and identity. Every item scored against the published Unite scope and assigned a recommendation - migrate, retire or remain - with documented sign-off from information asset owners, clinical leads and information governance.
02 · Local preparation and user mapping
We run the user mapping exercise in Novalysis, our own platform: staging cohorts, driving the Microsoft Forms campaigns the programme requires, tracking response rates and flagging unmatched accounts for information governance. Alongside that, ODS-code aligned naming and mailbox remediation.
03 · Early risk identification
Pre-flight checks against known Unite blockers - oversized mailboxes, send-on-behalf usage, broken calendar links, sharing-link gaps, unsupported workflows, Whiteboard, Loop, third-party applications, and the Power Platform and Microsoft Forms estate the programme does not migrate. We triage and escalate early, while there is still time to act.
04 · Communications, adoption and cleanup
Cohort-based communications campaigns, audience-specific training for clinical and non-clinical staff, floor-walking on cutover, hypercare, then decommissioning of the local tenant and a clean handover to business as usual.
What the programme leaves with you
This is deliberate programme design rather than a shortcoming, but it is worth being precise about, because it is where the risk to a large organisation actually sits.
Unite carries root-level permissions on the sites that move. Unique permissions below root level are not carried, which means restricted content can become visible to every member of a site unless it is re-secured first. The programme’s own Readiness material requires sensitive content with complex permissions to be moved into private channels or sites before the Readiness stage completes, so this is both significant and time-bound.
Alongside it:
- Devices, Intune and the identity model
- Power BI, Power Apps and Power Automate - self-migration, with guidance only
- File shares and home drives, out of scope entirely
- Third-party applications and their integrations
- Tenant decommissioning
- What actually changes for a clinician on the Monday morning
Completing the programme’s own list is roughly half the job.
Three routes for the workloads left behind
We stay aligned to the programme throughout. When you are ready to deal with the rest, there are three honest routes, and we will tell you which one applies.
- Fold it into the migration. Some workloads are safer and cheaper done alongside the move, on the same discovery data and the same change freeze calendar. Permissions remediation is the classic case.
- Run it in parallel. Some can share the project timeframe as separate workstreams with their own plan - devices and Intune, Power Platform triage - where capacity and funding genuinely allow.
- Defer it, with a costed roadmap. Some genuinely belong after cutover. We say so plainly, size them from the same evidence, and leave you a roadmap rather than a cliff edge.
Everything is priced from what discovery actually finds, never from a risk allowance. Nothing found means nothing to pay.
Three ways to work with us
We own it. The task list is noisy and your teams have no spare capacity. We take the trust-side work end to end, and come back to your engineers only when we need them.
We augment you. You are part-way through and your specialists are capable. We plug into the gaps on a split responsibility matrix rather than starting again.
We validate. You have done the work. We check the numbers are real rather than an artefact of how the scripts were written, and cover what the programme leaves out.
There is no right answer and we arrive with no preconception. What you have already done is the starting point. We do not redo it, we do not talk it down, and we do not charge twice for it.
Powered by Novalysis
Novalysis is our Microsoft 365 migration planning platform, and for Unite it acts as the live workspace for the trust-side workstream.
It deploys as a single-tenant Azure managed application into your own subscription, in UK South, read-only through Microsoft Graph, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online with least-privilege scopes. It reads workforce directory metadata, not content. No patient data, no clinical content, no message bodies. Your data never leaves your tenant or the UK.
- Audit trail and governance. Every keep, retire or migrate decision captured with rationale, owner and approval status, so information governance enters cutover with full traceability.
- Cohorts and communications. Stage users into migration waves, then run scheduled campaigns per cohort with reply-all protection, FAQ management and stakeholder reporting.
- A workspace for your IT team. Task management, real-time collaboration and dependency mapping, kept separate from BAU ticketing.
Lessons from live migrations are encoded as rules and run against your tenant automatically - disabled owners with active OneDrive accounts, Teams without owners, orphaned external access, sites with complex permissions - rather than retold as war stories.
Experience, stated plainly
We have supported NHS organisations through these stages since the programme’s earliest phases, and we are live with acute trusts and engaged with ambulance services today. Our experience is current rather than a case study.
We are tooling-led and consultant-augmented. The platform does the heavy lifting and people make the decisions. We do not arrive with ten consultants and a workshop plan.
We also put in writing what Novalysis does not cover and what stays human. If something should wait, costs too much, or belongs with your own team, we will say so.
Start by telling us where you are - which stage you have reached, what has bounced, and what is blocked. We will tell you honestly whether we can help.