AKO/DKO Score A TKO Everyday!

By Jeff Erlichman

Army Knowledge Online/Defense Knowledge Online (AKO/DKO) offer a single point of entry into a robust Army KM system providing access to a growing network of enterprise services.

AKO/DKO is an incredible collection of enterprise services used by more than 335,000 every day.

In total, 2.2 million users have access to enterprise services that facilitate communication, collaboration and the free exchange of ideas. An AKO/DKO user needs to remember only one user name and password to gain access – with proper credentials – to more than 1,200 applications including My Profile and The Virtual Thumb Drive.

“There is only one identity, user name and password in the Army and that’s the AKO identity, user name and password,” declared LTC Ken Fritzsche, AKO Chief of Operations.

In a recent interview with 1105 Government Information Group Custom Media, he further said that having one user name and password also means that only one Help Desk serving those 1,200 applications is needed – saving the Army countless dollars.

AKO also provides each user with an email address they can use everywhere they go. “It allows them to have an email box used by the Army to communicate with them and allows them to communicate with their support network – their family members and friends – when they are deployed,” said LTC Fritzsche.

Physically AKO/DKO is located in three data centers – two in the U.S. and one in Asia. It provides portals; as a part of portals you can build web pages, post files, set custom access controls, do polls and questionnaires. There is also a social networking capability called My Profile and there are blog and Business Process Management capabilities.

AKO provides IM, chat and CERT, along with directory services and single sign-on to over 1,200 Army applications.  In their spare time, they manage the www.army.mil Army home page and video messaging.






AKO serves both classified and un-classified users equally and has about 2.2 million unclassified users and 120,000 classified users.  On a typical day LTC Fritzsche said they will handle about 335,000 people logging in between 950,000 and 1 million times.

Nothing touches the user like email and on a typical day AKO handles between 10 and 18 million messages on its email servers.

“Users access our email servers via web mail or client of their choice,” said LTC Fritzsche. “Everything we do is open standards that ensure we are as interoperable as we can be with all the different products and IT services around DOD.”

“Another really neat thing we have been working on is federating our identity and the single sign-on capability with DOD services,” LTC Fritzsche said.

Army users are used to having one user name and password to access to all these different sites, but when they have to go to DOD sites such as My Pay or Tri-Care, DOD has to issue them credentials. What AKO has done according to LTC Fritzsche is federate AKO credentials with the DOD credentials, so now an AKO user can access those DOD services with their AKO user name and password.

Search and Go Mobile
LTC Fritzsche oversees a lean government technical team that keeps the AKO collection of enterprise services running 24/7/365. But that doesn’t mean he and his teams aren’t working 23/7 to constantly evolve and improve AKO services.

“The biggest rollout we have had over the last month is the new search engine we are providing. In the past our offering was spartan and didn’t take advantage of what industry has to offer, but now we can now offer a truly a great search engine.”

Another project LTC Fritzsche is working in is Go Mobile.

“In order for our email solution to be useful to organizations we needed to provide a mobile solution. And we went out and found a messaging client that was compatible with our email services and works with most mobile devices.”

As a result LTC Fritzsche said now that if an organization needs mobile email, calendar, address book, tasks, with AKO they can have a Windows mobile device with a client on it that will let them get access to all those services. They are also working on making the AKO portal more mobile friendly by designing web pages specifically to be viewed on mobile devices. Access AKO from a desktop and you’ll get the full blown version of the web page.

My Profile
One of the greatest things AKO does is allow soldiers find other soldiers. Before AKO came into existence the only way a soldier could keep in touch with someone they served with was to exchange phone numbers or addresses.

“Now you get an AKO email that stays with you and if you retire as Army you keep the email,” said LTC Fritzsche. “So you can always keep in contact; you can use the user directory to find current phone numbers and mailing addresses.”

Further AKO has used the Facebook model to create My Profile. “We took that basic capability and turned into social networking site called My Profile,” explained LTC Fritzsche. “It started as basic and has turned into a complete capability that you would have on Facebook or LinkedIn. You can enter in education, certifications, skills, hobbies and assignments in and out of the military.”



All 2.2 million AKO users have a My Profile page said LTC Fritzsche. “If the user has not built their own page, we provide a default page that just contains name, phone, rank and current duty location. The user can then go in and make any modifications they want and put job history, education and the hobbies and skills, which  all becomes searchable.

Users can also add pictures to their profile noted LTC Fritzsche. “What’s great about that is we can take those pictures and post them on the white pages directory, so when search for one of the 437 John Smiths in the Army you can use pictures to find which John Smith you are really after.”

Virtual Thumb Drive
One of the most popular AKO applications is the files area. Not only is it a repository for storing files, but it also does file versioning for you.

Say you need to send a document to 10 people. Instead of sending it to each individual person and consuming all that storage when put into 10 different mailboxes (and you double that when someone makes a change), just load into AKO and send link to people.

Now when someone makes a change, the link from the old version sends you to the latest version because there is only one location for someone to do collaboration on the files and one latest version.

“We call it a Virtual Thumb Drive,” LTC Fritzsche said. “Store the file on AKO and send link and they can share your Thumb Drive. Or if you have to go to give a presentation, load it to AKO and when get to destination just log into AKO and download. You don’t have to carry or worry about losing it.”

The Virtual Thumb Drive preserves bandwidth and storage as well as increases security because if you are not transporting the file, you won’t lose it.

Chief Blogging
Huge improvements in social networking capability have been made within the last six months as technology and vision have come together for the AKO/DKO.

“We are reaching a critical mass now. Probably three-four years ago we weren’t seeing the traffic, but now people are using AKO more and more to get their job done – including senior Army officials.”

“We  had the Chief of Staff of the Army come to us and tell us they wanted to blog to keep all senior officers informed and collaborate,” said LTC Fritzsche. “Today it is used today by Chief of Staff of the Army’s Office to communicate with senior officers and leaders via blogging.”

What makes this all possible is the authentication that’s behind every user name and password and CAC that is used to access AKO. “Since AKO is not open to general public, there is a confidence that the content on AKO is not going to be revealed to our enemies,” remarked LTC Fritzsche. “There are areas for discussion that allow the free exchange of ideas within a cloak of privacy.”

That’s why “AKO is an incredible collection of enterprise services that is heavily used – 335,000 every single day and the most was 390,000, “said LTC Fritzsche.

If you are an AKO/DKO user then you already know why.