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The U.K.'s National Health Service Licenses JDS
deputydink writes "Recently the NHS licensed from Sun 5000 seats of its JDS system for tactical deployments within the health care service, adding that it deemed JDS a viable desktop alternative for certain types of user communities. The NHS has already deployed JDS in its back-office. This could be the high profile boost for JDS subscription services that Sun needs."
It includes Linux as underlying OS to run on, and several components that are also used in Linux-based systems. Is that good enough?
Tactics are components of an overall strategy. Strategy wins the war, tactics will win the battles. In this case, "tactical deployments" probably means "we don't really know how well this is going to work, we certainly are not going to risk our mission critical functions (and jobs) on this, so we'll figure out where to use it and let you know how things pan out".
"The NHS has already deployed JDS in its back-office."
/. article is wrong. More likely that they deployed JES (Java Enterprise Server)
Probably not, although I hesitate to suggest that a
Well if you recall, Mozilla 1.0, 1.4, and 1.7 were all 'extra stable' codebases, designed for vendor repackaging and forking.
It would be unwise for Sun to run Mozilla 1.5 or 1.6, because in between the 'extra stable' releases a lot of things change and (historically) break.
Once a year or so, the code gets the big projects landed and the tree gets a more thorough debugging than normal, any forks happen (camino, netscape, galeon), and a 'benchmark' release is made.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The Linux part of JDS is an unaltered *ancient* SuSE system (SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop: hybrid of 8.1 and 8.2). Except if you count the replacement of the grub splash and the fb look as a modification.The only real modifications by Sun are on XFree and Gnome (backports and enhancements).
IMHO, no, because it contains old versions of programs, incomplete translations (Mozilla and StarOffice don't have as much translations as for example Galeon and OpenOffice), less than standard hardware-recongnitions (due to older kernel etc..) and does not even include KDE libraries (i.e. you can't even run k3b, which is IMHO the only excellent cd writing program in Linux). Personally I prefer any real distro such as Mandrakelinux, SuSE or Fedora above Sun Java Desktop.
But commercially Sun is a big name, and probably that alone makes them interesting for some people...
The UK doesn't have an ER. We have Accident & Emergency ;) For those times when emergency would just cost too much...
I sincerely hope the NHS IT project doesn't follow this course. But, for yours and other non-UK citizens benefit, there follows an explanation of how UK government IT projects are usually run.
Such projects usually start with great, noble intentions. They may be a tad ambitious, but that's about the worst thing about them.
The contract goes out to tender, and bids are taken. Eventually, supplier(s) are chosen.
Then the requirements change, usually because they weren't very clear to begin with, or they were too ambitious, or not ambitious enough or..... Most suppliers charge a fortune for changing requirements part way through a project, so this costs taxpayers quite a bit of money.
The project now continues (with its new requirements). The requirements then change again, with an attendant price increase.
Repeat this a few times, until you have a project which is up to 2 years late.
Finally, the nice shiny new system meets requirements (more-or-less). But non-functional requirements frequently haven't been considered. "Non-functional" requirements are those which make the system usable as opposed to functional. It might be that there's so much information presented at once that staff cannot easily use it, or that the system is considerably slower than expected. It's around now that the press starts to ask questions. Like "What happened to that new system which was supposed to revolutionise XXXX?"
The government blames the supplier(s) for failing to build an appropriate system. The supplier(s) blame the government for continually changing their requirements and generally being very difficult to work with.
After a while, the pattern becomes apparent - no matter which suppliers are chosen, the involvement of the government has become known as a kiss of death. This doesn't always help the supplier either, particularly if they bid for a number of government projects. Google for "crapita" to get an idea of what I mean.
While there needs to be a security mechanism within hospitals, even there medical records won't be stored on desktops (except fleetingly, e.g. while a pathologist is drafting a report). One of the reasons why the NHS doesn't want to store medical records locally is the risk of equipment theft. This can typically be a problem in A+E departments, where it's usual for members of the public to just walk in off the street.
In Scotland (due to devolution, the NHS Care Records system doesn't cover Scotland) there is a scheme for wireless PDS-like devices for community nurses. Those use a clever solution; the device stores the list of patients that the nurse needs to see that day, but doesn't store any medical details. Just as the nurse is abouty to visit a patient, the relevant information is downloaded via a wireloess network. This approach minimises the information leakage if a PDA is stolen. (I'm not clear on whether this is already deployed or is a pilot).
Since some of the UK regions will be using Microsoft-based systems in the back end and some will be using Sun technologies, then a security problem in either is a serious issue. Not only that, but there is an extensive legacy infrastructure (all sorts of weird stuff - MUMPS for example). The NHS is the largest employer in Europe, so they will probably have at least some of everything. That means that a security problem in almost anything would need to be actioned by some part of the NHS. Hence the security approach needs to be multi-layered. While many of the companies in the programme are trying to do things very cheaply (the NHS was very agressive in price negotiations), I doubt they'd be stupid enough to deploy deliberately insecure solutions in order to save money.