healthAlliance was formed in 2000 as a shared service between Counties Manukau DHB and Waitemata. These services later extended to Auckland DHB and Northland DHB, known as the Northern region DHBs, to provide health services to 36% of New Zealanders. At the time, the technology supported by healthAlliance comprised of approximately 16,500 desktops/laptops and 1,500 thin client devices/terminals, used by approximately 27,000 users across the four DHBs. Daily support and maintenance of these devices (and users) relies on supporting infrastructure and services including directory services, mail services, file and print services, and remote desktop support.

Our mandate was to upgrade the current Microsoft Operating System to Windows 7 for all healthAlliance supported devices (approx. 18,000) in order to mitigate system security risks as a result of using software that were sitting on an operating system platform that was no longer going to be supported.

The upgrade provided a more modern platform for on-going development and as a result enabled a number of future system deployments for applications that had a dependency on the OS. The executed approach also set the blueprint for future OS upgrades.