One-third of Army now uses AKO portal

The Army Knowledge Online intranet is getting closer to senior officials’ goal of signing up all 1.5 million active-duty, reserve, National Guard and civilian personnel for accounts by Oct. 1.As of Sept. 20, 436,000 employees had AKO accounts, up from 167,000 two months ago.The enterprise portal provides free Web e-mail, Army news articles, banking information, white pages where soldiers can look each other up regardless of location, three search engines for the .mil domain and hundreds of links. There is also a job bank, an application to track deployment days and other topical information the user can customize.Army officials said the intranet is robust and performed well during and after the terrorist attack on the Pentagon.“We are building new capabilities and strengthening security and failover to make it even more capable,” said Miriam Browning, principal director for enterprise integration.