EMIS roll-out delayed until October

From the EMIS website this afternoon...

Following the very successful configuration workshops held in March, many weeks of work have been done to further elaborate the agreed requirements to ensure they meet the needs of MCDEM, CDEM Groups and TA's. During this elaboration, it was clear that some additional information was required to be incorporated into the EMIS portals and user feedback has confirmed this.

In addition, Microsoft has just released SharePoint 2010 as an upgrade of SharePoint 2007 and MCDEM has decided to use SharePoint 2010 as the foundation of EMIS, instead of SharePoint 2007. SharePoint 2010 is better equiped to provide the functionaility the configuration team agreed during the configuration workshops, in particular around resource and task management where significantly better outcomes can be achieved on SharePoint 2010. It also means that we avoid rolling out EMIS based on SharePoint 2007 now, only to have to repeat the process soon after to upgrade to SharePoint 2010. Utilising SharePoint 2010 provides a more future focused approach and no system outages or re-training would be needed to migrate to SharePoint 2010 .

In order to allow the required time to complete configuration and development for the initial EMIS build on SharePoint 2010, then to fully test the solution and offer system training to trainers and administrators, a decision has been made to extend the EMIS go live date. It was felt the benefits we gain far outweigh the delay, and it provides a more future focussed platform to allow any future EMIS releases to be more easily integrated. We are in the final stage of re-planning the timeframes with our key suppliers, but it is envisaged the go live date will now be early October 2010.

We are aware of the potential impact on the use of the EMIS in the planned national CDEM exercise scheduled for 20 October and will make every attempt to deliver an EMIS well before this time. However, it may eventuate that insufficient time is afforded agencies to gain a suitable level of confidence with the EMIS before the exercise. If this is the case, we would not expect users to use the EMIS during the exercise, that could be optional.