The system achieved some of its highest usage during the COVID-19 pandemic with over 1.5 million unique visitors monthly. In 2019, Enterprise Services launched AKO 2.0, a modernized version of the portal that was designed to be mobile-friendly and facilitate collaboration via online communities. They supported the development of the public-facing Army.mil and the “Soldier for Life” site that received national attention on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” AKO was, in fact, the only collaborative hub for individuals working with classified information on the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network.ĪKO engineers were known for sharing their expertise with teams operating other Army organizations’ websites. For the last five years, the classified and non-classified versions of the portal continued to be a place for users to store files and conduct training. While DKO eventually shut down, and Army email accounts were migrated to Defense Enterprise Email in 2013, AKO itself forged on. In 2008, the AKO/DKO project office opened a newly renovated help desk center to serve more Soldiers simultaneously as the portal expanded to more than two million registered users. The following year, Defense Knowledge Online (DKO) was stood up to provide AKO services to the joint warfighting community. In 2005, under AKO product manager Taylor Chasteen, the Army awarded a contract to industry to manage and administer the portal, which by then was used primarily for file storage, document collaboration, directory services, instant messaging, training and email. At that point, the system took off and gradually expanded its capabilities. 11, 2001, the then-Army vice chief of staff declared that all military and civilian employees would be assigned an AKO account for emergency and status messages. Indeed, PEO EIS helped support AKO, an enterprise web portal providing a variety of tools and technologies to users, since its founding as a general officer email system back in 1998.

“It’s been a good run,” said Lee James, project director for Enterprise Services. Army Knowledge Online (AKO) may have stopped being accessible to users at the end of June, but PEO EIS’s Enterprise Content Collaboration and Messaging (EC2M) product office - part of EIS’s Enterprise Services portfolio - officially brought the program to a close on July 26.

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