New DII(F) IT System
 

Our stn -a large Oxonian AT hub - is currently migrating to DII(F). On the face of it, it would appear to hinder productivity rather than assist it.
Does anyone already using it have any feedback on what it's like when the dust has settled?

Not the most exciting topic, I know, but one that has more than a few here a little flustered:confused:

Also at the said AT Hub. Lots of rumour, not a lot of info on what is actually happening. Current IT network is adequate a best, routinely very flakey.

I don't get a warm and fuzzy feeling about the next few months.

CounterSunk,

You're in for a rocky ride, my friend. DII has not been the sweet bed of roses it promised (then again, anything was better than what we had). Most of the features presume that you have a terminal to yourself. As soon as you're sharing, as a lot of folks I know do, then the most basic applications go to rats. And F ain't gonna change that.

Being a long time DII/F user ....... please give me back my DII/C! We have had more downtime (sometimes litterally whole days) since we have had F than all those put before it. Plus since you now need it for entry to everything else; personal files, emails and JPA, when it goes down all my staff do is sit and play solitaire!

DII/F is :mad:

Another excuse to go flying then....Hurrah for DII(F) then...

UG & CS,
Beatriz and BJ have it right, expect a bumpy ride. Whatever you do, don't let the installation team (floorwalkers) go until you are completely happy with your workstation and it's configuration. If the same migration process is used as here at the 'Wood, your Business Unit Point of Contact (BUPOC) needs to be on the ball and keep chasing up all the identified defects.

I never thought I would say this, but come back DAWN, all is forgiven. My group migrated from DAWN onto DII(F) some 18 months ago and we are still waiting for some of our key software applications to be delivered via DII(F). After some 12 years, the DAWN system at the 'Wood was actually quite stable and all our specialist applications ran quite well. Then along came DII(F)! Just wait until you find out how much each call to the SPOC costs, never mind any Change Requests.

Oh, BTW, the intranet is still down "with technical problems", for the second day.

One unit got DII(F) and through idleness, some were put on servers from their old job (other countries in some cases). It is over 3 weeks now and 1 person has the job of sorting it - the HELP!!! centre can't do it. Not efficient or useful.

On the plus side, they have had 3 weeks without e-mails and probably 3 more until people realise they are back?

And you will have to learn a whole new raft of acronyms. At £7.3Bn they obviously had a whole office full of wanabee designers.

No longer do you have a CPU and VDU. Now you have a UAD!

I migrated but it took 4 weeks (they lost the application) to transfer me from DII/c to DII/f. In fact they didn't transfer me at all. I did the transfer by saving all my Dii/c emails and address book etc and documents and emailing them to my new account. When they did the 'transfer' they stated that information on Dii/c would not be transfered and that despite assurances last year that it would.

Then getting access is another WHOLE new ball game. I was lucky. I did an ISyO course 18 years ago so I was qualified. I was then able to get a password for my IMO but he has yet to do the security course. As for the rest of the guys - no chance. They have done the course to use Dii/f but they now await an AD to authorise their accounts - at a cost.

The AD is an Authorised Demander and, as of last week, Air Command had not decided who was going to be the AD.

Ah, love it when a plan comes to gether. One final thing, Dii/f guys (Atlas) come in pairs. Dii/c made do with one technician.

Thankyou for the kind words and reassurance. I'm staggered that such a busy MOB is being subjected to sweeping change with next to no interaction with IT end users. Where are these 'floorwalkers' mentioned earlier in the thread? First user is apparently scheduled for October, do we all cutover together? :eek: Note to self: Ask for leave in October.

Will we still get Pinball in the games package on F? That's the only thing that got me through the DII C training!

Thanks the notes gents.
Had the Atlas guys on the Sqn today. They still seem to think that we have a full-time IT manager hiding on the Sqn somewhere, and don't seem to understand that 40+ pilots will all be using one of 2 or 3 terminals...sorry...UADs:ok:

Not to mention how the data is actually managed - that seems a confusing mess at the moment - has anyone used the new file registry structure yet?

It just smacks of a project pushed from above by an office-bound 'specialist' with little or no regard for how the end-users work.

And there was me thinking that IT should enable our productivity....:sad:

DII(F) for Fcuked
 

DII(F) is no where near as bad as they say, it is in fact far far worse. It took them 14 weeks to set up my account and then they had set up the wrong role based email address. It then took a further 4 weeks to get the email address corrected. NB if you haven't previously had a DII(C) account you don't get a personal email address as that bit of F doesn't work.
And don't ask what is going to happen if they try to deploy FD.
:{

As someone who spends as little time as possible in front of a 'uad', im assuming this is some new kind of computer network. If this is the case, how is it going to manage alongside the changes currently being implemented, and of course i mean the well loved bocs package. And if this is as bad as all seem to suggest, how are we now going to access the all singing and dancing jpa??? is it that the RAF is just going to fall to bits???

Uncle Ginster, don't worry about 40 pilots and only 2-3 UAD. You won't get 40 accounts :}

Beatriz, no worries, games are there.

pprune users will be partially fcuked. Under Dii/c you could log in to your IGS account every 6 months. With Dii/f you have to log in every time. progress.

George, I had both accounts on Dii/c now my personal account seems rather hidden. Better, when you open outlook the personal folders are collapsed and new mail is not notified. Great excuse to the boss "sorry Boss, didn't see it."

One other thing... forget about seeing most of the pics on the PPRUNE threads whilst at work, as the DII funpolice block photo-sharing sites such as Photobucket, Flikr etc.

Your new capability
 

Forgive a cynical old fart for intruding - but is this what the oficer B^**$dge meant when he brought up "network-enabled, agile, adaptable.........Blah " a year or so ago? I weep for you, I really do. Thank the Lord I'm no longer in.
The Ancient Mariner

Going Down
 

If my wife went down on me as much as DII has I would probably still be with her. It is a recognised as a threat to productivity and to Defence as a whole - but we've got it and its up to us to make it work like JPA.

I use to work for the IT supplier whose technology underpinned the DII(C) core nodes and from my side of the fence the roll-out seemed to go relatively smoothly.
Unfortunately we worked with the wrong Prime Bidder for DII(F).
I spent a lot of time with that bidder making sure that the fundamental principles of rollout, migration and info management were covered, I even put one of my best guys imbedded in their team full-time for a year...but we weren't selected.....

How much?
 

The NAO report on DII says that current cost for 150,000 terminals is £7.1 billion. Thats £47,000 per pc.

Reasons to be chearful 1,2,3....4,5,6
 

I am now convinced it is an expensive cr*p system but every cloud has a silver lining. I cant find my work and my boss can't find me on the system (nor can I). The extra time saved in not doing my work is spent logging on and trying to find the sticket on my desk for the IGS.

i can get onto JPA so have spent many happy hours putting in my quals and hours, ready to do it all again on Monday when the system hasn't saved them.

Oh how happy I am with the MoD!!!:bored:

There's a recurrent theme here - people who don't actually contribute directly towards aircraft operations are often oblivious to the difficulties they cause those who do. The list is long and distinguished, as ProjOs for everything ranging from IT 'upgrades' to additional fitness tests, to stat-obsessed bosses press on with their pet projects, often with little regard for - or increasingly to the detriment of - the Service's primary purpose: generating aircraft. Thereafter the primary task suffers as staff struggle to cope with disruption caused by premature 'upgrades', are blamed for not adapting to changes they're not briefed or trained on, and are forced to take on additional responsibilities as the burden increases. So people become more stressed as they're disabled by unstoppable and uncompromising, contract-driven change, mistakes are made and bosses concentrate on apportioning blame.

It's rubbish and I'm off. :bored:

Just wait until a certain defence agency is told to move - allegedly - it's bandwith eating data stream to DIIF:eek:

Alarm bells are certainly ringing here now. Rumour has it that BOCS will not migrate to DII, although how we then access it is unknown (can we have STARS back please, it worked ;) ).

Do they also take all the old IT away and replace it with ATLAS stuff? Again rumour has it that all the decent large monitors which CIS gave us to view the BOCS planner will be replaced with a standard 'made in Hong Kong' Aldi special.

Lastly, again all rumour, we will be denied the Image Runners as printer/scanners and USB access won't be granted until Increment 3 (whatever that is).

Is there anyone out there who has a clear understanding of these things? (and yes, I've asked the on site 'experts', CIS Eng appear to be as much in the dark as the rest of us). :{

I would guess that all you have heard is true - everything else bad has happened!!

Oh yeh? Are there any plans to deploy DIIF to hot and sandy places .....:uhoh:

Things must be really bad!

Only a recent (forced) convert to Stars at Waddington this year, but it did nothing to help the worker, indeed it added numerous man hours to those chosen to manage the system.

Ok it might have been good for giving the bosses oversight of who was doing what, but if the bosses could not even be bothered to populate the system ... No, it really did not make things better at Waddington. (so far anyway)

As to DII, it might just about be a workable system by the time its replacement arrives, but it will have consumed, and wasted, far too many hours that could have been spent on something productive.

But don't worry, I am sure that there are a lot worse things than DII that the UK armed forces are having to put up with.

Y_G

The Devil in the Detail
 

The way it was briefed to us:
- legacy equipment now belongs to Atlas to do as they see fit.
- legacy equipment will be replaced by DII, but not one-for-one, we only have funding for 75% of what we already have!
- We pay an annual rent for the new gear of £200-£400 per pc depending on usefulness; printers and IGS access are extra on top of that.
- Scanners are incompatable with DII.
- Atlas can give us anything we want - at a cost
- There are no funds left, so the answer is no.
- Its a ten year contract, so my £47,000 pc will cost another £4000 in rent plus an unknown amount for printing and IGS.
- We don't get the programmes we already own, we only get what is in the DII portfolio if we pay again, and there is no cash to pay, and we won't get them for 12 - 18 months anyway.
Did I miss anything?

Not so sure about this Milarity? You are right - we only get what applications are in the DII(F) portfolio. If an application isn't in the portfolio, it's because nobody (your IMs) told Atlas what was needed, or funding to it was denied.
In addition to that, users will only get what their respective IMs have told Atlas that they should have in their account setup. So all users don't get all applications.

I'm almost :bored: 100% sure that BOCS has been migrated, as has PFPS (for those that use it).

Unless anyone knows any different?

Caveat: the above is based on nothing more than what i've been told will happen...and most of that appears to be total bolleaux so far :ugh:

Uncle G
 

You may well be right.
There seems to be 2 common themes coming to the fore:
1. We cannot provide you with any information at this time.
2. We needed to know that information 6 months ago and you should have realised that we needed it and provided it.

Uncle, I am an IM. I was told I would get JPA, HRMS, MFMIS and of course Microsoft. I was not asked what I wanted. I didn't want JPA and of course we don't get MFMIS and EAMS is not compatible. Besides EAMS needs a 2Gb pipe and I have 256k. I did ask for a floppy drive and got one of those.

At least it boots faster than Dii/c.

Latest news, you can keep Dii/c as well but is will cost £500 per month.

One bit of kit was only bought and fitted for Dii/c a year ago. We are swapping out old CRT VDU for LCDs on our other kit and will give Atlas the old crap.

Why do I need a floppy drive? Well we had some pre-Dii/c kit but it was never cleared for Dii. This means I can do virtually what I like with it including running some bespoke software that is also incompatible with Dii/f. However I need to swap docs between the 2.

Was told last week by one of the Atlas people that if the application you need is not in the Atlas portfolio then it will take around 9 months to get it. Until then you get to keep a legacy machine to run your application.

In addition to get a new user account or change existing details will take 25 working days from application.

Pontious, as you say, the recurring theme here to me seems to be the additional cost of any additions to the system - one of the reasons for my starting of this thread is to hear from those already migrated just how true this is? And whose budget does it come from when things are missed? It's not just the DII/C that's changing, but also all Intranet functions upon which, dare i say it, most of our productivity relies. Have you seen the file protocol as dictated from high up in A6? How did we ever end up with that mess???

Also, as the Sqn IM, i am acutely aware of what's being 'sold' to us. I was hoping that some/anything posted might save us dropping a proverbial and costing the Sqn at some point down the line...here's hoping!

One other thing that strikes me is the level of responsibility being devolved to Sqn-level IM/BUPOCs. I'm lucky(?); I have some academic background in IT and computing.:8 Several others, it seems, have nothing more than signed a set of TORs and now on their head rest the sqn's succesful migration...correct me if i'm wrong, but that's how it appears at the moment:*

Thanks for your posts - keep 'em coming.:ok:

BOCS has been listed in the DIIF portfolio for about 18-24 months. STARS did not meet the requirements necessary for inclusion on DII. This is one of the reasons that BOCS was rushed out ahead of really being ready - it had to be ahead of the original DIIF rollout date for the Secret Oxon Airbase or there would have been nothing and, even with all its faults, BOCS is better than nothing.

Indeed. I have just been appointed as an AD but I have 2 UIN so it could be interesting if I make an authorised demand but the budgetteer say wrong UIN. Now I am minded too . . . :}

Agree what you say about experience. I did my course at Newton in 1991!

Yes, but as the application is still being developed it won't get a DII green light until it is steady state, hence it's unlikely to be 'adopted' by DII.

I'm not sure how BOCS will be presented post-migration, or supported, nor does anyone else it seems (including the BOCS wizard in the ITOC).

BK

You say that: STARS did not meet the requirements necessary for inclusion on DII.

I thought that it was an Access database. A universal sort of application.

Do you know why DII doesn't like it? Just interested.

S2

PS. BOCS is not better than nothing

Spurlash2,
DII(F) doesn't do Access, at least only the runtime version if you're lucky and your case has been successful. No reason AFAIK, just policy.

And another thing, ... the video codecs are out of date and won't even play the video links on the MoD Intranet or the external MOD internet site. Doh!

Cpt Pugwash, that one is easy. Call the SPOC and call it in as a fault. When I went live it would not open Adobe PDF. Nor would it run Java Script - at least not the version that HRMS demanded.

I called them both in and they sorted the problems out straight away - like a month for PDF although there was a messy workaround.

There is also a glitch in Google. Several links from Google will come up with the dreaded BT blocker BUT is you copy the url rather than use the google link it will work.

Is this true? We've been lead to believe here that the runtime version of Access is part of the basic software list that all users will get? The runtime version only cuts out files without a 'front-end' or page of buttons to work with the database...so if your files have been well written, there should be no snags (it says here!)

Uncle G.

I went to the Database 'surgery' held fairly close to your location on Monday. What you have been led to believe is true. The only database I tested that did not work on a DII(F) machine was one without a front end. The others worked fine.