ACES Group was hired by the Headquarters Air Force (HAF) Operations in 2017 to help them modernize their Knowledge Management and Business Operations. Legacy systems and manual processes were bogging down the headquarters organization. ACES evaluated all options to modernize the environment and recommended HAF transition to the Microsoft Office 365 IL-5 Government Community Cloud (GCC) even though HAF top technical experts had advised against this.
ACES was put in charge of the HAF pilot tasked to be the pathfinder for the HAF to transition to Office 365 and recently presented its solution at a USAF Sponsored, Microsoft Hosted, 2-Day Office 365 Security and Compliance Workshop in Reston, VA. One of the comments made by and Air Force attendee was that they were blown away, by the solution and that it answered every problem they were struggling with when it comes to using this new Office 365 environment. Even the Microsoft Senior Engineer who led the 2-Day event shared with everyone in the room how impressed he was with the model and emphasized that no one could have done this without a deep understanding of the organization and how it functions.
The Knowledge Management model ACES created in Office 365 was developed to standardize how the USAF and DoD would use the Office 365 services to modernize Knowledge Management and Business Operations in the USAF and DoD. The model centers on Microsoft Teams Workspaces as the focal point for collaboration and content creation. The AF Knowledge Management Officer in HAF Operations refers to the Teams Workspaces as "sausage factories" where all the work is done. Once content is finalized it is automatically migrated to a SharePoint Online Communications site which functions like a museum that securely distributes, manages, and automatically dispositions the final content in accordance with NARA and USAF Records Management requirements.