Now this is the Army we all know and love
In a brilliant cost-savings measure that only the US Army could do, they have not gotten enough Microsoft Office 365 licenses for all of the Army’s soldiers and civilians to have their own accounts. Looks like they’re only planning on giving out Army.mil Email addresses to NCOs and officers.
Now how will a junior enlisted soldier know they missed a dental appointment, they need to renew their SHARP training, or be able to complete any suicide awareness computer based training?
First Sergeants will have to once again meet their troops face-to-face instead of conducting business by passive-aggressive Email. We are not prepared for this.
Jeff LPH 3 sends in an Army Times report;
The Army’s ongoing adoption of Microsoft-based email, teleconferencing and collaboration services for its “Army 365? platform could leave hundreds of thousands of soldiers, civilians and contractors without official email access, Army Times has confirmed.
The issue stems from the Army opting to purchase individual Microsoft 365 licenses rather than providing them to all of the service’s personnel. The Army has to pay for each individual license, meaning the arrangement could save money, a source familiar with the transition explained.
Right now, the Army’s plan is to grant licenses — and thus new Army.mil email addresses — only to NCOs and officers, according to an interim licensing guidance memo issued by Lt. Gen. John Morrison Jr., the service’s top uniformed IT official.
Army Times obtained a copy of the memo from a source involved in implementing the email transition.
“Commands will have to make some hard choices,” wrote Col. Joseph Gardner, a senior officer responsible for overseeing the platform’s rollout across the force, in a separate email explaining the license distributions last month. Army Times obtained a copy of the email.
Currently the Army has only procured 950,000 licenses, the memo stated. Those are intended to cover the needs of soldiers, civilians and contractors.
It’s not yet clear how many licenses will go to each personnel category — the Army is allowing subordinate commands to oversee the distribution process.
One thing is clear: the Army had 1,008,373 troops as of Sept. 30, and the service has hundreds of thousands of civilians and contractors who will also require email and collaborative platform access.
Army officials did not respond to questions from Army Times before this article’s publication deadline.
The service’s existing Defense Enterprise Email service provides official, secure email access for all Army personnel. But the platform is scheduled to go offline for the Army in March 2022, officials have said.
Junior enlisted troops whose duties necessitate email access will need to have an exception to policy approved by the first colonel in their chain of command, according to the memo.
More at the source.
Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Army
Or here’s an idea, mid level NCOs flat out refuse to conduct ‘online’ bullshit, if for any reason it’s worth the paper it’s printed on.
No track, no class. Short the chip on your CAC, it ain’t hard. Got microwave?
Everyone knows not-a-fking-man takes it seriously, it’s a giant block check that was created by worthless DoD civilians and blue-haired Green suiters that serve no actual purpose in the military. (We know the type: fat female SFC, nails over the line, pin cushion for every other POS SFC with a Dodge Charger…)
This is the same process to negate all dumb policies. I’m looking at you, CovAIDS vaxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxine.
Just give a Dot.mil account to everybody except the E-4 Mafia. They know what’s going on and are protected by the Sham Shield. Easy peasy. Oh, and leave off the 2LTs…they’d get lost surfing the inherwebz.
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Replace Gump with KoB, in a good way (h/t) 😘
I am the box of chocolates of TAH Life. Have a Sea Salt Caramel?
While funny it is a nod to the novel. In the novel Gump is an idiot-savant with an IQ of 160.
Not really surprised it isn’t any example of wokeness. They kicked all the retirees off of the dot mil e-mail function years ago.
Yup. At 0001 on Saturday morning, after my final day Friday clearing supply and records, and I had juuuuuuust enough time to clear my .mil account and download all my personal info that evening and night, my .mil and CAC card ceased to exist.
Unfortunately, this also made it much more difficult to get retirement information from OPM. Logic would say (i know, i know. army and logic are incompatible), transfer the .mil into a civilian account, with access to info and personnel that can softly complete the transfer from military to civilian life.
It’s been 7 years, and just this week, I was finally able to adjust my health and life insurance, and reassign survivor benefits to my daughter. All due to hard to reach internet connections, and slow people involved with the postal services.
I’ve got a strange idea, that the Army probably won’t actually choose…because it makes sense!
Determine who actually needs an account? Does every private and NCO in the Infantry or Armor unit need an account? Put you sure as $h!t need the private doing logistics or training stats to have one! Does every Soldier in an MI unit need one? Well, they can’t do their job if they don’t have one! Same for the civilians and contractors! The Army could probably pay Rand or maybe even MITRE to do a study and determine exactly how many people, and what position, needs an account and at what level!
Another cost saving measure is they could just make every contractor use their Companies (Office 365) account at work, passing the cost onto the Contractor to maintain the account…just an idea (I am not an IT expert so I am not sure of the routing and trust issues with separate domains allowed to operate inside and outside of the networks…or if there is even an issue!).
The service’s existing Defense Enterprise Email service provides official, secure email access for all Army personnel. But the platform is scheduled to go offline for the Army in March 2022, officials have said.
Why?
You don’t need MS Office to have an email address, so why are emails being tied to Office?
It doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to spend more for the Office licenses and end up with less services and less communication.
Just a guess, but with Outlook being a Microsoft product, and the government running on Microsoft Windows, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Access, it’s all one big happy bureaucratic bundle. After all, Bill Gates is running the country.
Microsoft is tying everything to MS Office in an effort consolidate all our information in one, easy to access package.
Easy for Big Brother to access, that is.
They’re moving to Office 365. It’s a “software as a service” thing. Software subscription basically. Instead of paying once and you own it, now you pay for it constantly and never own anything. Perfect sales pitch for the government!
Yup, if Microsoft don’t like what you write, they can suspend your account until you display right-think too.
Microsoft sucks and Teams is just a piece of crap no one would buy had it not been for Teh COVID.
Contractors almost guaranteed HAVE email. Why do they need a military account? And don’t colonels have anything better to do than approving Snuffy’s email?
The two times I was a federal contractor, I had to have access to either .gov or .mil email. Had nothing to do with my employer.
dot gov, dot mil, dot us. Where’s the coolness now that everyone has one?
My dot net is still way more cool than any other dot.
You want cool?
name@nasa.gov
Now THAT’s cool.
(^__*)
We got a guy here that’s got one of those and frankly, he’s kind of a nerd. 😉
Pervy foul-mouthed nerd. He likes to use the F word a lot.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Nope, not at all. 🙂
When I left the USMC a couple of years ago, the MCNOSC (MC Network Operations Center – or whatever the new name is) still ran MS Exchange so 365 wasn’t a problem. Not sure what they are doing now. USMC is much smaller, in any case.
I thought the Army was fully on board with mail.mil – the centralized email service for all but the Marine Corps (the CMC wants his mail to read usmc.mil, dammit). Wasn’t sure if there would be a limit in that case. Guess so.
As for the only NCOs getting email accounts now, I guess some sergeant is going to get stuck as the company clerk now?
It works off MS Exchange, so big F-in’ deal…
OK, side rant:
Had dinner with Airborne Brother last weekend, where he related his… experience… with a contractor (“she may have been 17”) who didn’t want to do anything toward getting him his CAC card for the job he’s been doing for a couple of years now.
Airborne Son’s medical discharge paperwork has been lost by contractors twice now – and now they cannot find any of it, telling him he’ll have to take a disability discharge unless he can re-submit it all.
I know we have some inefficient and lazy REMFs, but at least someone up the chain of command can make them get off their butts and do something.
How the H-E-double-hockey-sticks do you budge a lazy civilian contractor?
You don’t. But it’s easier than moving a lazy, entrenched federal employee*.
*Fair disclosure: I am a eebil, double-dipping federal employee, neither lazy or entrenched.
Also fair disclosure, I am likewise an eebil retired state petty bureaucrat.
But inside the system you learned how to get around the idiots.
Catch them somewhere quiet and private with no witnesses and bust both their legs to start with.
Wow. Things have changed since I retired.
I didn’t get one of those fancy email accounts until I had been an E-7 for a while. Because I didn’t need one, according to whoever made such decisions. After 9-11, I suddenly needed not only that, but multiple computers, and a whole bunch of super duper stuff. Funny how that worked.
Aaaaaaand……what about when Pvt Snuffy is now promoted to Sgt Snuffy?
Or when Orificer Ballzack retires?
Whole lotta makework keeping up with the changes. What could go wrong?
Cost savings? We don’ need no stinkin’ cost savings.
Sounds like an Upper Echelon Puzzle Palace Perfumed Prince wanted to check a box for a promotion.
SNAFU!
Oh God please don’t make me talk to my Joes face to face said no leader of yesterday.
word.
Alexander the Great got pretty close to his men… allegedly.
Patton got to within smackin’ distance of his privates.
It would be fairly simple to assign a domain such as (contractor).army.mil to the contractor’s email system. The contractor then pays for any needed licensing.
I suspect some decision-maker is looking at getting in good with the MS folks, as prep for a retirement job with them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBGi6DAY0kw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tALDcVmWE9w
Safety first Alec!
” The Army has to pay for each individual license, meaning the arrangement could save money,…”
Want to save all the money? LibreOffice is absolutely free; NO license fee!
There is absolutely no reason MS should have a monopoly on Army software–certainly not for security reasons. I also see no reason why every swinging dick needs a gov’t. email account account. Everybody seems to have their own phone these days (except for disagreeable sorts like me); let them get their own email accounts.
Bill Gates’ Revenge intensifies!
I was a SSG in the Inf. Not long before I ETSed, I was walking through the HGC company office building and some SFC saw me and asked me ” hey Andy, you get that thing I sent you a few days ago? I haven’t heard back from you.” I just looked at him stupid before it clicked with me what he was talking about. I told him no and he talked to me about whatever inconsiquential bs it was. Then I trudged off to my room in the barracks to check my ako account for the first time in forever, and there was nothing there. So I went and tracked him down in his office and asked him where he sent this email and he showed me his out box, it was someone with the same first last name as me but with a different ako address. I just told him, look, I don’t have a gov computer because my job doesn’t require one and I never check my ako, so just talk to me.
I find it funny that they are doing this because when I left the Army all those years ago, they were telling us we were going to use our ako address for everything from getting orders notification, to other bullshit, guess that’s a thing of the past.
*HHC office
Stupid phone posting
Reminds me of work at an war room:
Dude on phone: What, you don’t know his phone number?
Me: No, I get up and talk to him.
Don’t know anything about these dot.mil/dot.gov/dot.ako e-mail addresses to Privates/Sergeants/Officers. All I know by reading this is that I’m feeling down right sorry for all those visually impaired/blind people at Skilcraft and Ability One who assemble medium point black ink pens and green Memoranda books are being put out of a job with each passing year.
FSN/NSN’s for pens/books available upon request./smile
Don’t worry, they won’t be put out of business so long as there is even ONE 1SG or PSG that insists everyone have a pen and notebook at all times.
Just don’t put the pen in that pen holder on your uniform’s sleeve.
What a mess, Army loves giving lower tier soldiers collateral duties like Security Manager and expect them to take care of clearances. Now its gonna be a clusterfuck.
It gets better.
With Army 365, you can only access it on government funded equipment (government provided computer) connected to the NIPR domain.
Email is now part of Army 365.
Guard and Reserve SMs don’t HAVE government computers. AND you’re not supposed to email anything with PII to an non .mil address.
Can you see where I’m going with this?
About the level of genius when they made MEDPROs restrict to GFEs and NIPR domains.
And Tour of Duty (not Call of Duty). ToD was/is a job board for Reserve/Guard ADOS tours. Which can only be accessed on GFEs connected to NIPR.
Big Army is doing their best to screw over the Compo 2 & 3 people. And then wonder why retention is in the toilet.