Vanessa Johnson, the lead 88th Communications Group Communications/Cyber Planner for the CHES email migration of Wright-Patterson AFB, along with Dave Swanson, the technical lead for the 88th Communications Squadron, are part of the network enterprise team and were able to migrate all of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base users, except the 88th Medical Group.
After the migration, a cleanup was performed to correct glitches and update email accounts that did not migrate. Some names from the base-wide list may have been missing or high risk and taken out of the migration to be handled individually.
There are various reasons as to why some users did not migrate; however, through the use of virtual Enterprise Service Desk (help desk) tickets, Johnson and Swanson were able to work with the 88th Cyber Operations Center team to make sure all issues were resolved post-migration.
The process of the migration itself included downloading and updating computer software to every individual on base in the span of two days. The way these issues were mitigated beforehand was through the use of notification alerts about the migration in splash screens, articles to the public and emails to networker users.
“When you’re migrating such a big base, you’re never going to get 100 percent when it comes to migration,” said Johnson. “We advise our customers to make sure that they are looking out for the emails and other notifications, because the 88th Communications Group and the 88th Communications Squadron will continue to provide information to our users to make the migration a greater success.”
Johnson said overall the migration was a success with multiple email boxes consisting of more than 30,000 users, group and distribution boxes, with an estimated total of 50,000 items, were updated, with a 99.4 percent success rate.
Users can look forward to the rest of the cloud-hosted enterprise services coming in 2019. The email migration has now moved on to other bases across the Air Force.
Johnson said the project management team will continue to update users on future CHES migration initiatives.
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