Army seeks an elastic cloud capability for enterprise-level content management

The Army’s Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS) has issued a Request for Information to provide the Army with a better understanding of industry capabilities, potential sources and best practices relevant to enterprise-level content management (ECM). The RFI comes specifically from PEO EIS’ Project Director of Enterprise Services.

The service is also looking for industry to aid the government in determining out-of-box suitability for integration with existing and planned DOD enterprise services, DOD public key infrastructure, Enterprise Application and Services Forest, other identity and access management, and security event and incident management program capabilities.

The results of this RFI will be shared with other agencies such as DISA to be possibly used for their potential DOD-wide cloud-based enterprise service approach.

“Responses to this RFI will assist the Army in determining if sources exist that are capable of satisfying the Army’s ECM requirements with specific interest in affordability, agility, global reach, reliability, interoperability, and security,” states the RFI.

“The Army desires to learn about ECM solutions that enable large enterprises similar to the Army to create: a central repository for all types of data (i.e., e-mail, file shares, photos, video, digital meeting records, etc.); provide integration points for information and data across applications, collaboration tools, and office products; and enable data collection, discovery (including capabilities for electronic discovery), and information lifecycle management.”

More specifically, PEO EIS desires to learn about solutions (or set of solutions) that provide the following capabilities:

* Content Repository – highly scalable management over all forms of content/files.

* Document Management – support for end user document-centric requirements, which end users access via browser-based interfaces, including the ability to integrate with commercial off-the-shelf collaboration and office automation solutions.

* Business Process Management – workflow and case file application engine.

* Records Management – management of information in accordance with DoD 5015.2 record management requirements.

* Content Collectors for: file systems – ability to sweep content from file systems based on configuration rules; email systems – support for email archiving for performance, records and legal compliance, and enhanced collaboration; and commercial off-the-shelf collaboration solutions – ability to sweep content from COTS solutions based on configurable rules to support de-duplication, cross-domain sharing, and knowledge management.

* Content Auto-Categorization – automated metadata tagging of content to support records classification, improved search, and the triggering of business processes.

* Search – both full text and metadata-based search across all content, with support for granular security based on user roles and groups.

The Army’s requirements for ECM cover up to 1.6 million users spread across various geographical and network boundaries and domains. The Army is seeking a cloud-focused capability that is elastic and can dynamically scale up and down to support surge demand and affordability. Additionally, the capability should be able to support multiple environments such as coalition and interagency.