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One of the world’s largest groups to deploy email hosting – the U.S. Army – has revealed that the Defense Information Systems Agency (News - Alert) (DISA) has surpassed the half million user milestone for the Department of Defense Enterprise E-mail program (DEE). The program aims to bring all of the DOD into the same unified Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange-based e-mail system which is hosted in DISA’s private cloud.

“This is an incredible milestone and one for which every member of the team can be proud,” said Michael Kreiger, Army deputy Chief Information Officer/G-6, in his recent blog post, thanking DISA, the Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM), and other partners.  

According to Kreiger, another half million Army Knowledge Online (AKO)-only users will be migrate to the email hosting program by February 2013, and the Army is well on its way to completing Army migration to DOD Enterprise Email by the end of March 2013.

The DOD email hosting program aims to reduce the cost of e-mail to about $50 a user and it will help to save the Army $380 million over a five-year period, according to a report submitted by the Enterprise Email Army Service Acquisition 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,” Ars Technica reported. “The eventual goal is to provide a unified e-mail system for the more than nine 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 project began in earnest in April 2010 when the Army began a plan to consolidate its e-mail systems along with much of its other network services, integrating the Army’s more than 440 networks in the U.S. alone under a single Global Network Enterprise Construct.

According to DISA, the Department of Defense’s Enterprise Email service provides secure cloud-based email to the DOD enterprise that is designed to increase operational efficiency and facilitate collaboration across organizational boundaries.

Government officials said DEE is built to support the deployment of e-mail capability for 4.5 million users and a global address list (GAL) scaled to support 10 million objects, such as DOD Common Access Cards personas and Non Person Entities.

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