The U.S. Army has announced plans to move 250,000 users using different e-mail systems onto a single managed service platform over the next two years.

"A draft request for proposals pegs the possible price of the initial five-year contract for migration and subsequent management as topping out at $243 million," writes InformationWeek's J. Nicholas Hoover. "According to a draft migration plan, the Army will begin moving users to the new system beginning in November, and hopes to complete the consolidation effort by April 2012, when it wraps up the migration at Fort Myer, Va."

"Currently, the Army spends a whopping $400 million annually on e-mail, largely due to the administrative and support challenges of operating 15 separate Active Directory forests (one for the continental United States, another for the Army Corps of Engineers, another for soldiers in Korea, etc.) that run separate instances and in some cases different versions of Microsoft Exchange and Active Directory, and facilitating e-mail for 300 sites and 950,000 users worldwide across the Army's classified and unclassified networks," Hoover writes.

Click here to read the InformationWeek article.