You may have seen several emails saying, "transition to a CHES email account, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah... But what exactly does that mean. I will try to breakdown this down to the basics.

Air Force Network Integration Center, or AFNIC, worked with Dell EMC, General Dynamics and Microsoft on a $1 billion contract, that migrated all of the DoD web services airmen use day to day, to a Microsoft Office 365 collaboration solution. This transition now allows the Air Force to be more mobile by establishing connectivity to cloud services & reducing It's on-premise footprint.

By using Microsoft Office 365, you can now do all of your work on the cloud. Office 365 includes apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. You can work on Excel spreadsheets or Word documents on your desk computer, and then continue your work at home using your personal computer, by simply opening your work from the cloud.

With the Integration of OneDrive, your computer desktop, documents folder and photos folder will follow you from computer to computer automatically. OneDrive gives every user 1TB to use for personal use, that Is more hard drive space than most people have on their personal computers. OneDrive also eliminates the need for shared network drives.

Skype for business eliminated the need for Microsoft Lync. It allows users to communicate through text chat, voice calls, video calls and online meetings.

SharePoint Is no longer stored on different military networks, which frees up a lot of the military's resources. Now It all resides on the Microsoft cloud.

Probably the most difficult of all of the migrations, was was the migration from DISA Enterprise Email (DEE) to Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services (CHES). Now that Outlook is part of the Office 365 and removed the @mail.mil suffix to the Air Force emails. Now all emails end with @us.af.mil.

Microsoft Teams Is a tool that brings the military in line with business and industry technology standards. Even before the CHES migration, the Air Force led the way with Microsoft Teams, but now the entire DoD is moving to this Office 365 environment. When the COVID pandemic hit, Teams became an essential tool when working remotely. Remote work will continue to be a part of the military in some capacity, so everyone should embrace Teams.

Overall, the transition helps to modernize the Air Force by utilizing Microsoft's SaaS (Software as a Service) products, which Is the standard at many fortune 500 companies. It frees up network Infrastructures that Is no longer needed since Microsoft hosts the products. The military not only benefits from Microsofts currents products, it will benefit from future Microsoft Office 365 collaboration services as well.