Army Knowledge Online
Army Knowledge Online (AKO) is the worlds largest corporate intranet, and the US Army's single approved enterprise-class web portal. 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. As of this writing, AKO has almost 1.8 million registered users, and supports over 314K unique logins and 8 million emails daily.
AKO was established in the late 1990's 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. Mr. Wells worked on establishing the NIPRNet (unclassified) version and Mr. Bailey joined the scene later to establish and experiment with SIPRNet or Classified versions. Mr. 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, white pages, unification of data conduits, central capability of authentication and repudiation of credentials and the ability to remotely access content.
While some features seem unremarkable in today's world, this project was the first and most pervasive of the military's ventures into the web 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.
This portal methodology has been since selected as a key pillar of Defense Knowledge Online.
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