Army Knowledge Online, the service branch's long-standing enterprise content management and collaboration system, could soon be shuttered in favor of a new Army enterprise email system.

The Army's CIO/G-6 office is recommending AKO be "decremented" over the next 5 years, as funding shifts to a new email system currently under development, reports Federal Computer Week, based on a memo obtained by the publication,

"The Army is running multiple servers and a collaboration portal, a practice that is expensive, inefficient and contrary to information sharing and the Common Operating Environment," the Army memo states, according to FCW's report.

A source who has worked closely with the Army program (and requested to remain anonymous) offered some insight into why the Army might be scrapping AKO and starting from scratch.

The messaging portion, provided by Sun, was geared toward bulk email and somewhat inflexible, he said. Appian provided the portal piece, which required some custom coding and made it difficult for Army to divorce itself from program or get the custom components it wanted. Bantu provided the chat tool and Autonomy handled search, he explained.

"The greatest disadvantage, I think, is that it stayed wedded to its original technology and it has not grown or kept pace with the changes in the world," he said, noting that development of AKO began in the late 1990's when there were far fewer policies and best practices around ECM--especially within a secure, dot-mil environment.

If the shift from ECM to enterprise email sounds like a step in the wrong direction, it's partially due to the fact that the new email system is something of a misnomer, explained the AKO expert.

The Army enterprise email project is actually creating a user "forest" that will handle user IDs, passwords and authentication. Another forest will handle resources: The initial focus will be email. Later it will focus on collaboration, by adding a chat tool and a document storage tool, among others, he explained.

"The [original] concept [for AKO] was absolutely phenomenal. You had everybody in a single directory, you could look somebody up but when it came to collaboration and some other things the tools were falling short. And it became another thing that I had to log into," he said. "We should be past that stage. It should be part of one single integrated suite of tools."

For more:
- see the Federal Computer Week article 

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