1. NMCI NGEN (the successor to NMCI) was originally supposed to begin on 1 Oct 2010. However, they may not even award the contract until after that date passes. So the Navy is negotiating a "Continuation of Services Contract" with EDS that will last for 28 months, which is the expected time it will take to transition from NMCI to NGEN. Even if EDS wins the re-compete, they still expect a long transition.

2. NMCI Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7 to begin being pushed starting in Sep 2009, finish by Jun 2010. No clear timeframe on transition from XP to either Vista or Windows 7.

3. NMCI There are still over 40K seats within NMCI that are still running Windows 2000. They are expecting all of them to be at least at XP by the end of this FY. The Navy would like to skip Vista entirely, one reason being that apparently the CAC card software doesn't work right with Vista. However, there are licensing issues that Microsoft has that supposedly prevent us from skipping a version if we want to upgrade. The Navy is trying to work this out with Microsoft.

4. NMCI DAR (Data at Rest). 2 steps to DAR, with the first step having two parts. Eventually, all NMCI seats will have their hard drives completely encrypted using software called Guardian Edge. The second part to that is that all removable media (and email attachments) will default to being encrypted using either a PKI key, or a user-chosen password. This could have implications with the transfer of AIM export files. There's also a very slim possibility that the hard drive encryption could "break" certain applications. I asked whether the certification lab would be testing for compatibility with DAR and was told "we haven't been given any specific guidance on that."

5. NMCI The second half of DAR is the Pre-Boot Authentication. This is where a machine wouldn't even boot up until a CAC is inserted. And not just any CAC, but one that has been "registered" with that machine. I did ask, and was told, that each machine could have up to 100 different CAC's registered with it.

6. NMCI Application Certification Right now, once an app is submitted, the notional timeline for certification (assuming no problems) is 30 days for a simple app, 55 days for complex. Things are "slow" right now, and they should be able to get things through much quicker. When asked how the process might change under NGEN, we were told "we're still working those issues".

7. NMCI Application Hosting Facility It is in Tulsa, OK. Could potentially be a candidate for a CPM/Metaframe-based Central Site I need to check to see if it’s NMCI-only