ARLINGTON, Va. (Army News Service, June 20, 2011) -- Since February, 70,000 Army users have migrated to the Enterprise Email service.
This includes staff members working for the Army chief information officer/G-6; Army Cyber Command; NETCOM/9th Signal Command SC(A); 7th Signal Command; the Research, Development and Engineering Command, HQ 93rd Signal Brigade; Fort Riley, Kan., and Fort Monmouth, N.J.; Rock Island, Ill.; and Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.
Enterprise Email is leveraging Army-owned Microsoft software licenses and the DoD cloud provided by the Defense Information Systems Agency. The migration covers 1.4 million unclassified network users and 200,000 secret network users.
The effort is expected to produce significant efficiencies beginning in fiscal year 2012 and generate annual savings exceeding $100 million in fiscal year 2013 and beyond, officials said.
"The Army remains on track to migrate all users by the end of the year, but we are also working through several major issues we did not anticipate," said Mike Krieger, deputy CIO/G-6. "The Army, DISA, Defense Manpower Data Center, and our many vendor partners are working very hard as a team to isolate and address the problems."
In a recent blog, Krieger pointed out issues being addressed:
1. Help desk/reporting procedures need to be reinforced.
2. Migration schedules need to be better communicated.
3. Good configuration control over desktops being fixed.
4. Consistent firewall/Top Level Architecture configurations being fixed.
5. Non-Person Entity/Distribution List cleaned up.
6. Common Access Control cards data quality -- Army will use the Defense Manpower Data Center data base as the authoritative data source and fix the data quality issues.
7. ActiveClient/Tumbleweed/Vista/Outlook/Exchange Integration issues are being fixed by vendors pulling together to identify the problems and their solutions.
The Enterprise Email, or EE, conversion would be challenging, even if it were being introduced into a mature, robust enterprise network, Krieger said.
"Our enterprise is not there yet," Krieger said, "and so while EE migration is moving forward steadily, it is forcing significant changes to the Army network and many network business processes. The migration is not seamless, but the capability improvements EE is delivering are significant."
"Migration is like painting your house," Col. Gary Langston of the CIO/G-6 said. "No matter how good the paint is, you have to prep the house. Once you prep the house, really good paint will be great. If you don't prep the house, you should have just used the cheap stuff. At some point you have to talk about the homeowner and every member of the paint crew, not just the paint."
Related Links:
An Enterprise network: The key to Army transformation
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