Air Force HQ completes move to DOD Enterprise Email
The service begins its migration with 7,800 unclassified accounts and 1,300 mobile devices.
The user base for DOD Enterprise Email (DEE) just grew a little bigger, as Air Force Headquarters completed its transition to the Defense Department’s cloud-based, enterprisewide system.
About 7,800 unclassified accounts and 1,300 mobile devices were moved onto the system, which already serves about 1.6 million users, most of them in the Army. They are among the first Air Force users to transition to the system, according to an announcement by the Defense Information Systems Agency, which manages DEE.
The goal for DEE is to provide secure email, accessible from anywhere in the world, across the DOD enterprise as a way of improving operational efficiency and collaboration, and saving money. The Army completed the bulk of its transition in July 2013; other users include the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Joint Staff, U.S. Southern Command, U.S. European Command, U.S. Africa Command, and more than 20 other organizations, DISA said.
DEE, which can scale up to 4.5 million users, provides cloud-based Outlook email, calendars and other services such as archiving and journaling, and has a supporting global address list for up to 10 million objects, such as Common Access Card personas and non-person entities, DISA said.
“DoD Enterprise Email is a core service of the Joint Information Environment,” said Lt Gen Michael Basla, Air Force chief of information dominance and CIO. With the system, “we better align with joint warfighter needs and can apply greater focus on our core mission areas, rather than operating and maintaining an email infrastructure.”
The Air Force and DISA expect to transition about 150,000 classified email accounts to DEE in the next several months.
Still to come are the Navy and Marine Corps, which have expressed some reservations about moving to DEE, primarily over cost and whether they should abandon what they have now with the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet.
But DOD officials have been maintained that all of the military services will move to the system. DOD CIO Teri Takai issued a memo in September giving the other services and DOD component agencies until early this year to submit plans for moving to the system.