Army resolves enterprise email problems, rollout to resume next month

Network time delay problems and configuration issues forced the Army to stop the rollout of its showcase enterprise email system provided by the Defense Information Systems Agency last month, Army Chief Information Officer Lt. Gen. Susan Lawrence told reporters Wednesday.

Army personnel sharply criticized the new email system in posts to a July 11 Nextgov article, with one frustrated worker complaining, "it's the single worst email system I have ever had the displeasure of using. It has been down more than it has been up since we were stuck into the system." Another reported, "The system disconnects repeatedly."

Lawrence said the latency problems occurred between Army end users and the 16 DISA data centers that will eventually host 1.4 million email accounts for Army active-duty, reserve, National Guard and civilian personnel. Ninety-thousand mailboxes have been transferred to the new system to date.

Speaking to the press from the Army LandWarNet conference in Tampa, Fla., Lawrence said the Army and DISA have resolved the network issue and improved system configuration. She said deployment will restart next month.

Maj. Gen. Jennifer Napper, commander of the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command-9th Signal Command, based at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., acknowledged in a July 27 Army CIO blog post that in the early stages of the enterprise email deployment, "all Army installations had lots of issues with connections dropping and [Microsoft] Outlook freezing."

Napper said analysis determined the Cisco firewall service modules at DISA and Army locations "were reordering packets to such an extent it was causing the system to request large amounts of retransmissions and greatly reducing network throughput." Cisco provided recommended changes to configurations on the firewall service modules, which "greatly reduced the amount of out-of-sequence packets and associated packet retransmission requests."

This fix, Napper said, resulted in a 30 percent to 50 percent improvement in speed in performing functions such as synchronizing the Offline Address Book.

Despite the pain involved with the enterprise email rollout, Lawrence said the system will generate considerable savings for the Army, with the cost of providing email for an individual soldier cut from $125 to $34.

Lawrence said the Army is in the midst of another challenging process: developing a single, servicewide network to connect soldiers anywhere on earth. This would replace multiple networks designed for specific tasks or commands, such as those supporting logistics and medical operations, as well as a separate network operated by the Army Corps of Engineers. That single network, Lawrence said, will host multiple types of hardware, including smartphones.

But before the Army allows smartphones to connect to its network, they must incorporate the same kind of security and authentication software used by PCs. Lawrence said she is working with both Apple and Google to resolve smartphone security software challenges.

The Army also is in the midst of a data consolidation effort that will cut the number of data centers it operates from 300 to fewer than 75. Savings from that initiative can be applied to other needs, Lawrence said.