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GCN Home > 03/03/08 issue

Drawing a crowd

DISA’s inexpensive, two-button approach to collaboration attracts thousands of users

By John Rendleman

The Defense Department’s launch of approved collaboration tools has triggered rapid growth in networked interactions by its uniformed warfighters and civilian personnel, largely because of its unique approach of giving users a choice between two sets of commercially developed services, project officials said.

Last November, the Defense Information Systems Agency finished its implementation of DOD’s standardized collaboration services by putting the final touches on Defense Connection Online. The services are offered by systems integrator Carahsoft as the second of two sets of services that make up the collaborative elements of DISA’s Network-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES).

Last July, DISA finished its deployment of the first set of collaboration capabilities, the E-CollabCenter suite of services offered by IBM. The two services combined have tens of thousands of accounts.

E-CollabCenter is based on IBM Lotus Sametime collaboration software. The Defense Connection Online offers capabilities such as instant messaging, text chat, Web conferencing and shared whiteboards through partnerships with Carahsoft, Adobe Systems, Jabber and Science Applications International.

The collaborative tools represent DISA’s first attempt to provide a service that is built from commercial applications, as is the approach of offering two sets of side-by-side services developed and provided by separate vendors that compete for the loyalty of individual DOD users, DISA officials said.

The biggest benefit of DISA’s approach is that it removes the burden of creating, launching and managing the services from DOD and places it on the vendors, officials said. It also cuts DOD’s cost considerably because in contracting for the services, the department defined only the functions it needed, not the technical specifications of the services.

In addition, the government bore no costs for developing the services because they are based on the vendors’ commercial products, said Rebecca Harris, principal director of DISA’s NCES initiative. DOD contracted to pay only for service usage, so it pays just for the number of hours its users log monthly on the two services.

The services are provided as turnkey managed services hosted in commercial data centers paid for by the vendors, which frees DOD from deploying any of the hardware or software associated with the services.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Defense IT, Software Applications, Workflow / Collaboration



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