About DMS bidders
But the list of contenders was shortened
as questions grew about the complex architecture.
Has anyone gone through the exercise of taking the government's functional
requirements and mapping them into Internet/SMTP/etc. technology, too see
how well it could be supported, how much it would cost, how quickly it
could be deployed, etc.???
Dave
First, before we can get to your direct question, Dave, we
have some underbrush to (at least) recognize and identify.
How well do the stated functional requirements reflect what
the government really needs?
DMS, as a production system, is a procurement from one (of four)
unions within DISA. I'm not aware of what the other services'
plans for DMS are, but I know that there is very little consciousness
of DMS within the Navy. For example, the Navy's premier C3I
decision support software package these days is the Joint
Maritime Command Information System and the folks working
on that program are unaware of what DISA is planning in DMS.
JMCIS only knows about e-mail because it's built on a COTS
Unix base so SMTP is in the bundle. (I wrote the networking
spec for the TAC-3 contract and made sure we got X.400 in
it, but it's not being used).
My own understanding is that the security functionality
could be implemented equally on X.400 or SMTP. The spec
recognizes FIPS 146 in that it requires X.400. However,
(from memory) an RFC 1006 solution over TCP/IP is OK.
Now if we could just get SMTP and X.400 to converge and
co-opt each other ...
Probably the biggest functional difference between the
envisioned DMS applications and conventional e-mail is
that DMS is intended for organizational as well as personal
messaging. Consider the scale-up problems of, say, CentCom
during Desert Shield where command(_at_)centcom(_dot_)mil might be getting
several tens of thousands of messages a day. Few user agents
are equipped to internally route, account for, and tickle for
replies for this kind of volume. (The MH guys are happy
to handle 300 messages a day).
(This problem may be solved gratis for the military; I
understand that president(_at_)whitehouse(_dot_)gov is having a similar
problem;-).
Help?
Rex Buddenberg