Some things are bound to end. One is the legacy URLs -- the original addresses many garrisons had since the World Wide Web was a gleam in the eye of Tim Berners-Lee.
When we moved web sites over to IMCOM Enterprise Web, we worked with regional and local NECs to make sure the legacy web addresses worked for six months, plenty ot time to get users and search engines used to the new URL. Garrisons were advised to start making the change even before the new home.army.mil sites went live. Some arrangements were longer, but the deals were made one garrison at a time.
We made an effort to preserve the legacy URLs -- at least the ones that made sense. Some old addresses obviously dated to the early days of the Web. Others reflected some serious overthinking on someone's part. There were slashes, dashes, dots and subdomains -- those oddities were on the chopping block in any case.
Security and licensing ended that idea. Both agencies we worked with encouraged us to use a single URL. In fact, the first said it couldn't be done, given the resources. The second made a compelling case of cost and time vs. mission success. In the end, we would have had to get a commercial SSL certificate for each URL, at a siginificant cost to the program. Also, we would have had to run each garrison through the FISMA process.
No. Just no.
We realized the change from www.swampy.army.mil (or swampy-www.garrison.swampy.army.mil:8080/home/index.aspx) to home.army.mil/swampy would require publicity and planning -- neither possible on the short timeline of our final sprint. So we started making deals with local and regional NECs to redirect the legacy URLs to the new one. This arrangement was made only to give the garrison time for a smooth transition.
Transition complete. Garrisons had the six months' transition. The legacy URLs have done their jobs, and are ready to retire with dignity.
