Today, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) announced it had passed the half-million user milestone for the Department of Defense Enterprise E-mail program, an effort to bring all of the DOD into the same unified Microsoft Exchange-based e-mail system hosted in DISA's private "cloud." The Army is the first customer for the program, and aims to have 1.5 million service members moved over to the DISA-hosted service by February.
The project is projected to reduce the cost of e-mail to about $50 a user and it will save the Army $320 million over a five-year period, according to a report submitted to Congress in February. In addition to the 500,000-plus Army users, another 20,000 users within DOD at joint commands and at DISA are currently using the system. The eventual goal is to provide a unified e-mail system for the more than 9 million users across all of DOD's agencies and individual services (though originally the hope was to have 900,000 users in place by last December).
The Army began a plan to consolidate its e-mail systems, along with much of its other network services in April of 2010, pulling together the Army's more than 440 networks in the US alone under a single "Global Network Enterprise Construct." After preparing to take bids on the e-mail portion of the plan, the Army turned to DISA when the agency pitched a pay-per-user alternative.
The program hit early problems during the process of migrating e-mail accounts from the Army's myriad of individual e-mail systems to DISA's hosted Exchange infrastructure (which serves up Web mail accounts, as well as client-based mail for unclassified NIPR and secret-classified SIPR network clients). But by last May, the Army was migrating about one thousand accounts per night after making changes to the automated migration tools required to shift mail servers' message stores to the DISA cloud and to get clients pointed at the new mail service.
After the Army completes the rollout of enterprise e-mail, the Air Force will be up next. In March, DOD's Chief Information Officer Teri Takai said that the Air Force had committed to move to DISA's service, and that discussions were underway with the Navy.
In the meantime, the Navy is in the midst of its own major network migration project called the Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN). The organization released a request for proposals on the project, which has a potential price tag of $10 billion over 10 years. However, the request came in May after much delay, and the Navy was forced to extend its Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) contract with Hewlett-Packard. The HP contract was originally set to expire in 2010, but will now last until April 2014. NMCI outsourced the operation of most of the Navy's domestic networks originally to EDS, which was then acquired by HP. The contract extension also gave the Navy access to information about the network's operational data, which was HP's intellectual property.
Listing image by US Army
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