About Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre is a leading healthcare facility located in Toronto, Ontario. Since opening in 1948 as Sunnybrook Veterans Hospital, Sunnybrook has grown over the years into a world class health centre known for its cancer, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, trauma and critical care programs. Sunnybrook’s staff of over 10,000 physicians, nurses and medical support staff are dedicated to the treatment of the over one million visitors seeking medical care each year.

Business Challenge

In May, 2007, Sunnybrook began to explore migrating their current Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 (WSS 2.0) based portal to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) to provide its key stakeholders, primarily doctors, nurses and hospital management, with WSS 3.0’s enhanced collaborative features. After evaluating several vendors, Sunnybrook chose SharePoint HQ to perform the migration of its current hospital portal to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

Solution

SharePoint HQ’s consultants performed an audit of the existing Sunnybrook portal to determine whether an in-place upgrade, gradual upgrade or content database migration was required. Based on the results of the audit, SharePoint HQ’s consultants performed a gradual upgrade from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, SharePoint Designer 2007 and SQL Server 2005 were the main technologies used in the migration of the Sunnybrook site.

Migration to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

The pre-upgrade scan tool was used by SharePoint HQ’s consultants to identify any possible migration issues related to the existing site. A temporary URL was then created to host the existing Sunnybrook portal. Sunnybrook’s portal site collections were then upgraded in sections. Once the migration of the Sunnybrook portal was completed all the old site collections were removed and the temporary URL was deleted. During the post-migration process the old Sunnybrook WSS 2.0 portal was uninstalled.




 

Custom WSS 3.0 Portal Interface

Using Master Pages, created in SharePoint Designer 2007, a custom SharePoint portal interface, branded with Sunnybrook’s logo and colours was developed. Since its inception, Sunnybrook’s existing WSS 2.0 portal had experienced significant site sprawl and had eventually grown to over 60 sites. A new WSS 3.0 portal taxonomy was developed from the input of the key user groups within Sunnybrook to prevent future site sprawl. This resulted in one central site with navigation built around key user groups’ navigation needs. Above all, to ensure end user adoption, a simple to use portal that provided “one version of the truth” for all hospital documents and content, where critical information was just one click away, was delivered to Sunnybrook.


 

Results

After migrating to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Sunnybrook’s hospital staff now have a single point of access to a centralized, scalable and extensible hospital portal. Cooperation between Sunnybrook’s departments, doctors, nurses and hospital management has increased through SharePoint’s new Web 2.0 capabilities including wikis, blogs, discussion boards, RSS feeds and personal messaging. Hospital reaction times to critical information have been further improved through SharePoint’s timely, audience targeted unified communications. Through SharePoint’s security trimming feature Sunnybrook’s confidential hospital records have an additional level of security with end user access determined by their role within the hospital.

"SharePoint HQ’s consultants installed SharePoint 2007 without any disruption or downtime to our old hospital portal. Their consultants came in and quickly identified our old site’s taxonomy issues and how to prevent them in the future. Thanks to SharePoint HQ, we now have a platform that will provide our hospital staff with advanced collaborative tools that can be scaled out as the site continues to grow and evolve. We are very pleased with our new portal and SharePoint HQ’s professionalism in delivering it."
- Oliver Tsai Director of Information Technology Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

In choosing SharePoint HQ to migrate their WSS 2.0 portal to WSS 3.0, Sunnybrook now has access to the enhanced collaborative features of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 that will allow its healthcare teams to further connect and collaborate while continuing to provide world class healthcare to the residents of Toronto.