Army makes plans to phase out AKO
The portal would be replaced with an enterprise e-mail program, according to an internal Army document.
The Army's CIO/G-6 office is recommending shutting down the service's multi-purpose online portal, Army Knowledge Online (AKO), and eventually replacing it with its enterprise e-mail program, according to a June 21 internal Army memo obtained by Federal Computer Week, Defense Systems' sister publication.
According to the memo, AKO will be “decremented” over the next five years, with the funding slowly shifted to the Army enterprise e-mail system that is currently under implementation, and other collaboration capabilities.
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“The CIO/G-6 position is that AKO is no longer an efficient or secure capability for email, collaboration or storage. The Army is running multiple servers and collaboration portal, a practice that is expensive, inefficient and contrary to information sharing and the Common Operating Environment,” the memo states.
The memo proposes AKO funding be decreased incrementally from $70 million in fiscal 2012 to no more than $20 million in fiscal 2017.
The money would instead be used to help with the migration of 1.4 million Army accounts to the enterprise e-mail program, which is already under way in collaboration with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).
The resources would also help provide Web, collaboration and content management support for Army users through Enterprise SharePoint by 2014, and migrate roughly 2.7 million AKO military family and retiree users from the NIPRNet to “a secure enclave on the Internet.”