Army Knowledge Online

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Army Knowledge Online (AKO) is a corporate intranet for the United State Army, and the US Army's single approved enterprise-class web portal ^[1]. AKO provides secure access to Army web assets, tools and services to Soldiers, Army employees, retirees and family members worldwide. AKO is a driving factor in the ongoing transformation of the US Army into the agile, network based force that is required for today's conflicts ^[1]. As of this writing, AKO has over 1.9 million registered users, and supports over 314K unique logins and 8 million emails daily. It does however manage to crash and lock up on a daily basis making it one of the biggest hassles to service members.

1 History and development:
2 User
3 Function & Feature
4 Success
5 Help desk
6 External links
7 References
8 Category

[edit] History and development:

AKO was established in the late 1990s as an experimental outgrowth of a project headed by Nick Justice in GOMO. This early project led to A2O (Americas Army Online), but legal concerns over this name and the parallelism to other commercial vendors caused the Army Project team to seek a new name. Two very early major Project Officers for AKO were MAJ Charlie Wells and MAJ David Bailey. Each was charged to develop, research and expand the portal to benefit Army Users Worldwide and to grow the system from its less than auspicious roots. Major Wells worked on establishing the NIPRNet (unclassified) version and Mr. Bailey joined the scene later to establish and experiment with SIPRNet or Classified versions. Major Bailey also is sometimes credited with bringing the baselines for both projects together and with fashioning a "leader's dashboard" concept that to date has only been partially realized. The project has run through various incarnations and later project leaders, but still the fundamentals of this system apply...Centralized name spacing of email (with webmail access), white pages, unification of data conduits, central capability of authentication and repudiation of credentials and the ability to remotely access content.

[edit] User

Army Knowledge Online (AKO) is to let all Army personels, both soldiers and civillian contractors, access information whenever and wherever neccesary ^[2].
Since August 2001, all Department of Army cillians have to establish e-mail account with Army Knowledge Online. By October 1st, 2001, all active duty, reserves, and national guard soldiers are required to registered an account on AKO. There are 2 different types of account on Army Kownledge Online, a full account and a guess account. Authorized full accounts include the following:
Active Army , DA Civilian , Army Reserves, DA Civilian, Retired , Army Retired, Future Soldiers , Medical Retired, NAF Civilian , National Guard, ROTC Cadets (MS III and MS IV) , Nation Guard, Retired, U.S. Military Academy Cadets
These accounts does not required any sponsorship to register. Unlike full account, guess account is required an Army sponspor with authorized full account. Guess account include the following:
Army Volunteer, Incoming Future Soldier, Contractor, Local National Employee , DoD Civilian ,Medical Discharge, Family Member of Full AKO Member, ROTC Cadets (MS I and II), Federal Civilian Agencies, US Air Forces, Foreign Officer (attached to U.S Army), US Coast Guard,Homeland Security, US Marine Corps, Incoming DA Cilian, US Navy, Military Transition.

[edit] Function & Feature

The first and formost important function of Army Knowledge Online is its e-mail. Through this, information can pass through the chain of command much faster and more efficient than before ^[1].
Another important function of Army Knowledge Online is the online storage of soldiers' records. Before Army Knowledge Online, all military records were stored through in paper files storage system. Now, soldiers can look up their personal records at the tip of their fingers. They will be able to view and update their personnel data on the Web. This can be done at [IPERMS]http://iperms.army.mil ^[1].
Other functions have different focus.
Training function allows soldiers and DA (Department of Army) civilians to access Army online education such as Army e-learning Program, Army Learning Management System, Army Correspondence Course Program, Army transcript, US Army Reserve Virtual University, etc. These learning programs allow soldiers and DA cilians opportunities to enrich their educations, from business courses to Rosetta Stone language programs, all of which are free of charges. These courses can help soldiers with promotion points, and also later be transferred into college credits.
Finance function allows soldiers to access their financial records, including Leave and Earning Statement, Housing allowances, Food allowances, etc.
Medical function has soldiers medical records, including DNA, past physical exam, and status of deployment readiness.
There are many other functions such as legal, travel, benefits, family, forms, readiness, and references. Each has its own functionality, "allows the Army to operate more efficiently" ^[1].

[edit] Success

While some features seem unremarkable in today's world, this project was the first, largest and most pervasive of the military's ventures into the web portal space and is largely one of the most successful projects. This project can be credited with providing highly mobile Army users with non-transient email addresses, an ability to allow many web based products to share authentication schema, and with pushing the envelope on disaster recovery planning.