NHS Education for Scotland (NES) has awarded the Mouchel Consortium a £250,000 contract to provide an Enterprise Content Management Solution (ECMS) based on an open source Alfresco solution.

Consulting and business services group Mouchel and its consortium partner, Ixxus, will work with NES to deliver a fully integrated ECMS to provide facilities for an Electronic Document and Records Management (EDRM), Intranet and collaboration solution. The solution will serve 600 full-time staff and up to 200 temporary staff across five regions and 13 offices. Mouchel and Ixxus were chosen in preference to proprietary solutions including Microsoft SharePoint.

NES chose Mouchel and Ixxus to tackle its information management challenges by consolidating information onto a single ECMS platform which will provide access and collaboration to information in a much easier and more secure manner through the Alfresco solution communication, collaboration and productivity will improve across the organisation.

A spokesman from NHS Education for Scotland said: "We greatly look forward to the increased knowledge sharing and improved collaborative working that Alfresco will enable across NES."

Darren Laurie, senior director of the consortium, said: "We selected Ixxus as a Mouchel Consortium partner as they were able to offer NHS Education for Scotland an agile technical solution offering value for money. Mouchel is able to bring its change management skills to help NES adjust to more collaborative and integrated working."

Steve Odart, Ixxus sales director, said: "Working together with our strategic partner Mouchel we believe we can make a real difference to the way NHS Education for Scotland manages information to communicate and collaborate and drive significant service improvements."