The Army has migrated 87,895 email users--about 9 percent of its total--to a Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) email client hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency, but the process is currently frozen, said defense officials speaking Aug. 9 at an AFCEA NOVA event in Vienna, Va.

Enterprise email migration is currently in an "operational pause" likely to be lifted sometime in September, said Lt. Gen. Susan Lawrence, the Army chief information officer/G6.

Next week Lawrence will review changes made during the operational pause and Army will begin a cycle of restarting and pausing migration, she said. Army will move 3,500 users over night, pause for 2 days for review, move 3,500 overnight, pause for 2 days for review and if all the processes are correct, "we'll rip the band-aid and get going again," said Lawrence.

What initially triggered the operational pause is unclear. "We uncovered some pretty nasty stuff," said Lawrence, who cited an unorganized network as the primary culprit.

"We've uncovered a pretty dirty network after 10 years of war. No standards, 300 DAs thinking they can direct what happens on the network, units buying software not compatible with another application, no desktop standardization," said Lawrence.

"However painful it is, as we go through it, I stopped the fielding. I put us into an operational pause, and I said, 'We've got to go clean the network up first. I don't want to do this and then go clean the network up.'"

But comments from Rear Adm. David Simpson, vice director of DISA, indicate migration may have been halted because of scalability problems with DISA's enterprise email offering.

"We're learning, in DISA, that 90,000 isn't a million and a half. We've got to have services orientation really to scale up to that. So, as DISA enters into more of the provisioning of enterprise services we've got to take on a services management framework orientation," said Simpson.

One Defense Department contractor, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the problems came to a head when some of the migrated email accountholders were unable to receive emails from outside the .mil domain.

"Anybody who's put anything new into the Army knows how hard this is," said Lawrence. "What I want is for this to be the most positive user experience that we can have, and I have no deadline facing us that says I must be done by this date. I just know that it's the number one thing that we have to get done," she added.

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