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According to this page, the Navy is getting Outlook and Outlook Web Access, so I'm betting there's an Exchange server behind the scenes. Maybe that's part of the problem??

would highly resent having to replace all it's fine work on NMCI with a new technology. Even if it would be an improvement.

From NMCI's about us page:

The ultimate advantage for the warfighter? Increased combat readiness and effectiveness.

US Navy, tied into NMCI (Navy Marine Corp Intranet). Every app that is installed must be tested for compatibility. There is a procedure for getting new apps justified, but no apps will even be considered if they duplicate the functionality of an existing, approved app. There's a basic loadout, which includes MS Office and IE, which is the same on all machines and it was determined several years ago. It might eventually change in response to weaknesses in IE but it'll take a couple of years or so for all the paperwork to be filled out and a decision to be made.

I was on the carrier USS Kennedy the other day I remember seeing virtually every computer terminal onboard running MS Windows in some form or another.

The Navy is like any other governmnet agency; procurement through contracts. Dell and EDS won the contract. Dell provides great pricing to EDS and they lease managed "seats" to the Navy releaving the need for high level IT personnel at every command. More about this can be learned from the NMCI website.

I live in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, which is home to the world's largest Naval Base, along with installations from the other services (Army, Air Force, and Coast Guard). While much of the work is outsourced to contractors, there is a large active-duty staff that helps maintain things. As you would expect, quite a bit of it is your standard Microsoft fare, but there are some intersting Unix installs, too. There are a couple of active-duty folks in our local Unix Users Group. The big project seems to be NMCI, which strives to unify the Navy's computing systems. I have a couple of acquaintances who work there -- but it doesn't seem to work very well.

By far, however, the biggest thing you can get while you're in the military is a security clearance, which opens you up to the IT contracting jobs after you get out. It seems like two-thirds of the IT jobs around here require a clearance before you can even be considered (and I don't have one... :-/).

The Army will be rolling out these computers just like N. M. C. I.. The OS of choice will undoubtedly be Windows 2000 SP1 just as it is in N.M.C.I. Also, Office Pro 2000 SR-1a is standard on all machines amongst a host of other apps. Visio is a part of the standard suite of apps. The contract is being fulfilled by EDS. The $950.00 price tag is not across the board. That is just the baseline. Premiums will be paid for faster machines, laptops, and Science & Technology seats.

The transition has been rough so far as users have found that they cannot abandon their legacy seats in every case. Thus, you see a lot of dual-desktop situations. I hope the Army takes into account the lessons learned from the Navy and Marine Corps' efforts.

You are actually incorrect on this point. I'm also stuck with the lovely billet of being the NMCI rep for the unit, so I've done my homework here. You can start at EDS's site and then get even deeper at the contract award site. EDS is going to do exactly what their satement of work and contract say they have to do. Anything you may have read produced by the Navy or Marine Corps that contradicts these two sites is merely wishful thinking or bad information.

STRATIS(Warehouse management:Linux, Oracle), as well as ROLMS(Ammunition accounting:Solaris/NT, Oracle) and DMLSS(Medical Logistics:Oracle) are three systems that I am responsible for that employ non MS based solutions. All 3 of these systems have been identified by EDS Corp as LEGACY applications and will be supported in house by DOD personnel. The contract clearly explains the definition of legacy and non-legacy systems.

What you may have been thinking is what would happen if we elected to request EDS to support the functionality of the system. In this case, EDS would contract out and provide their own MS based solution which would be a non-legacy system. They would support every inch, or byte in this case, of the system. Legacy apps only get supported up to the link light on the LAN card...not the card itself mind you, just that there is a valid signal going to the card.

Currently Chinalake's unclass infrastructure has been rolled as I actually flew out there to verify the rollout some time back. The class portion is still in the design process. Here is a snip directly from the design doc..."Multiple inconsistent lists of classified seats obtained" This makes it difficult to design a solution when we do not have a firm answer on where and how many class seats there are. Your co-workers data could be legacy related and will be addressed when the design is complete. If it is a stand-alone lab then it could be exempt from NMCI completely. There are several documents that discuss the transition process including, I believe, documents discussing the app development process. If you go here you can find a good portion of the public documents for this process.

This project is called nm/ci and it has been around for better than a year.

nm/ci does make some sense, from the Navy's POV. Many ships and shore facilities use different OS's and different apps to do much the same kind of thing. For example, some commands, like mine, disseminate information internally in, for example, powerpoint 2000 documents. Not everyone here can even *read* powerpoint, much less 2000. They are doing this to facilitate communication.

Having said that, they are going about this rather stupidly (IMHO). They are trying to force *everyone* to use the same set of apps, regardless of what is needed. We are a scientific research facility, and we do a lot of work on Linux and HPUX boxen. However, Windoze 2000 will be the only allowed OS. The only allowed web server is IIS (God help us!). Anything that we currently have that is not on their approved list are considered "legacy apps" and are not allowed on the boxes they provide. *All* of our IT budget has already been taken by nm/ci. We no longer have money available to upgrade hardware. We will not have root privileges for the boxes on our desks, and we therefore cannot install apps that require root privileges. Technically, all boxes that *were* on our desks before nm/ci came along now belong to them, and they can take them away at any time.

In practice though, they don't know what they are going to do with the old hardware, and the odds aren't good that they will take them away. But our old hardware will continue to get older and there is little we can do about it.

As I said before, for most of the Navy, nm/ci makes sense. Sailors want to read and write email and Word documents. Most don't care about the OS or even which word processor they use.