Coming: A Bigger NMCI Mailbox

Navy Marine Corps Intranet users have repeatedly complained about the storage limitations of the intranet's e-mail system ever since the Navy and EDS (now owned by Hewlett-Packard) started to roll it out nine years ago.

Now the more than 700,000 NMCI users can expect a larger mailbox by the end of fiscal 2009, according to a month-old internal briefing that made it to my mailbox. While that briefing did not disclose the size of the mailbox, it did say NMCI would use Enterprise Vault and Enterprise Storage Management Tools from Symantec to improve storage and archiving.

By the end of the year, all users also will have access on the network to collaboration tools provided by the Defense Information Systems Agency through its Net-Centric Enterprise Services contract. Users can choose the E-CollabCenter from IBM, which is based on that company's Sametime collaboration software. It supports, among other things, multi-way chat and Web conferencing. Or they can choose Carahsoft Inc., which offers similar capabilities using tools from Adobe and Jabber, which was acquired by Cisco last September.

And there's more folks. NMCI plans to expand this year its use of the DISA NCES content delivery services piloted last year. This tool supports centralized, enterprise and federated searches using Web technologies including the intelligence community's Intellink to discover content by Web crawling.

NMCI's adoption of NCES tools is definitely good news for DISA, which has to persuade the services to use its services, and upgraded mailboxes will probably please some cranky end users.

But, what would NMCI be without cranky users?