The United States Army, in an effort to lower costs, travel time and scheduling conflicts associated with traditional classroom based training, created the Army Classroom XXI initiative. Headquartered out of Fort Monroe VA, the focus of Classroom XXI was to implement an advanced distributed multi-media architecture that would deliver state-of-the-art distance learning to Army officers and soldiers. The Army contracted mGen to work with them to build this architecture.

One of the keys in executing this initiative, as well as eliminating the potential for specific points of failure, was the role played by the Army's 17 Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) posts, which house repositories for multimedia called Digital Training Access Centers (DTAC). Each DTAC runs mGen Enterprise off a server farm comprised of database, application, multicast and video servers, which enable each DTAC to manage their own repository of information. Because of mGen Enterprise's distributed architecture, each TRADOC system can be managed locally.

Each TRADOC post maintains its own repository of information specific to its subject matter expertise. mGen Enterprise wraps this information around a full suite of collaboration tools, which provide the free flow of content and knowledge sharing to learners. In addition, since the DTAC supports audio, video, graphics and animations the highest-level quality of training assets is available to all learners who train on the system.

To date 15 (of 17 planned) Classroom XXI's installations have taken place at the U.S. Army's major schools, including Infantry, Artillery, Intelligence, Armor, Aviation and Logistics. The Computer Sciences Dept. at West Point serves as the Army's acceptance group for this program. mGen continues to serve as the principle technical architect and integrator for all of the installations, which include servers, NOC (DTAC), network infrastructure as well as classroom integration at each Army site.

" One of our objectives was to be able to replicate this throughout the Army, that it be truly scalable. Running off a single server eliminates the need for creating multiple copies of courseware. With other solutions we considered, we would have had to continue to add servers as our training program expanded and replicate the courseware across all of them."

Glenna Dobie, Manager,
Army Classroom XXI TRADOC Program