A computer problem that recently sparked a three-week outage of a new military child care portal has delayed the official launch schedule for the program.

The timeline for the rollout of the new MilitaryChildCare.com central portal, which initially includes 46 military installations, has shifted by three months. That means worldwide implementation of the remaining 185 sites will be completed by December 2016, rather than September of that year as previously planned, said Fred Henney, a spokesman for Navy Installations Command.

The Navy is the program's executive agency for all branches of service.

Installations are transitioning to the new program in a phased approach each quarter, so families are encouraged to check with MilitaryChildCare.com for when it goes live at their locations.

"As disappointing as it is to have a delay, it's better to slow it down and make sure it's working," said Eileen Huck, the National Military Family Association's deputy director for government relations. "If it works, it's a revolutionary way to connect families with child care."

The outage lasted June 2-19. When it hit, nine installations were in the midst of transitioning to MilitaryChildCare.com and could not complete the process. They also lost some data that had to be re-created, Henney said.

To date, 22,267 families eligible for military child care programs have set up accounts on MilitaryChildCare.com at the 46 initial participating installations. The latest installation to roll out the program was Camp Pendleton on July 14. By the end of 2015, 84 installations will have made the transition.

When the program went live in late January, it included 13 Navy installations in addition to five pilot sites. Now there are 31 Navy sites, six Army sites, eight  Marine Corps sites and one Air Force site.

MilitaryChildCare.com is designed to streamline the process to get information about, and arrange for, military child care at a service member's current or next duty station, whether at child development centers or DoD-certified family child care homes. Parents also can get a better picture of the availability of child care at a potential future duty station.

Parents can monitor the status of their request while on the waiting lists for notification of an available space. It enables parents to visit one location for their child care needs, rather than contacting the child care program offices of each installation, and allows them to start the process before they move. Among other things, parents can view maps to see how far a child care provider is from their home or work.

Since the program began rolling out, officials said a number of changes have been made to help families, and to expedite placement of children in child care. They include system-generated notifications to families about programs that they didn't request, but which have a wait time of under 90 days; a process that requires the family to reconfirm interest in child care every 30 days to allow their request to remain on the wait list; a message center for checking new messages about requests and anticipated placement times; and a page to get information about the status of historical and current child care requests.

The June outage also resulted in the loss of accounts created by 377 families from May 20 to June 2, so those families had to re-create their accounts, along with about 2,000 related child care requests. Installations that were using MilitaryChildCare.com at the time were notified June 3; DoD officials were notified June 10.

The website had a notice during the outage directing families to contact the help desk for support. The help desk assisted them in re-creating their accounts, Henney said. Another 9,500 requests required updates. Henney said no families lost their place on a wait list, and their anticipated time of placement didn't change because of the website malfunction.

"The help desk reported that families were generally satisfied with the information and support provided related to the service interruption," he said.

The NMFA's Huck said she hadn't heard from families during the outage.

The problem that caused the outage, which also affected other Navy websites, occurred during routine maintenance, and was not due to any cyber-security intrusion or hacking, Henney said.

MilitaryChildCare.com's backup tape drive system had a mechanical failure, and didn't restore the full information correctly. The backup tape was damaged, and information stored on it had to be manually loaded onto the system, Henney said.

Officials are reviewing the data center's backup procedures and protocols to figure out what changes or improvements are needed. Officials back up the data once a week, and retain it for 90 days.

Karen has covered military families, quality of life and consumer issues for Military Times for more than 30 years, and is co-author of a chapter on media coverage of military families in the book "A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families." She previously worked for newspapers in Guam, Norfolk, Jacksonville, Fla., and Athens, Ga.

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