Decommission of the eDC and eDC Gold Windows Mobile Devices

We are pleased to announce that NHS Supply Chain is coming to the end of a 12-month program of replacing over 1,000 eDC and eDC Gold Windows Mobile Devices with new Android devices. The Windows Mobile Devices have reached the end of their development and are no longer supported by Microsoft. The new Android technology offers increased speed and ease of use alongside the opportunity for future development and support capabilities.

During the rollout of the new Android PDAs, not all the Windows devices were removed from our customers, and we know there are instances of these devices still being used.

The next phase of the program will be to decommission the server that enables the Windows Mobile devices to send all transactions, and this will be happening on 31 March 2023.

What does this mean for you?

You will not be able to connect to NHS Supply Chain via the Windows Mobile devices post 31 March 2023. It is important to advise that NHS Supply Chain will not be able to reverse this.

What do you need to do?

Although we are in the process of contacting customers still using the Windows Mobile devices, we are urging you to contact our colleague James Owen as a matter of urgency to discuss your challenges of using the Android devices.

During the rollout program we identified that customers have not fully opened their networks which means that important Android updates, security patches and eDC and eDC Gold software updates are not being received.

This poses a security risk and means customers are not taking advantage of new features or bug fixes.

The latest version of the software is v2.6.4 of which you can find on your device on the login screen.  

Where we can identify that a device is running an older version, we will be contacting those customers directly.

However, we strongly recommend that if your device version is not as above, you should contact your local IT Department to request the following addresses to be added to the network on which your Android devices connect:

• URL: s107126.mobicontrolcloud.com
• IP Address: 52.51.137.234
• Ports: 5494, 443