Army portal tops 1 billion log-ins

Army Knowledge Online tallied its 1 billionth log-in this week, more than any other Web portal in the federal government, officials announced on Wednesday. Launched in 2001, the Army's intranet is being expanded across the entire Defense Department.

Army Knowledge Online is a collection of applications and social networking tools on the service's secure network, such as e-mail, file storage, discussion forums and video messaging. Its more than 2 million users include active-duty soldiers, as well as National Guard and Reserve members, civilian employees, and the Army's contractor workforce.

"AKO is basically the mode of communication for the Army," said Lt. Col. Ken Fritzsche, chief of operations for the portal. "I like to say we were Web 2.0 before Web 2.0 was defined. Users have been able to post original content and make their own Web pages since before the term was coined."

Those capabilities have expanded to include blogs, wikis and social networking profiles that are updated automatically with biographical information for everyone in the Army. Users can share profiles and information, much like popular sites such as Facebook and MySpace, to find people with common interests, jobs or locations.

The wiki component, which allows users to share information and knowledge about various subject areas, is new, but Fritzsche said it has caught on quickly.

"The wiki capability has grown in popularity immediately. On a day-to-day basis we're adding 10 to 20 entries at the highest level," he said, referring to the content submitted by users. To deal with the deluge of information, the Army Knowledge Online program office designates subadministrators to manage content in their areas of expertise, similar to the system used by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Those contributors include Army personnel, contractors and civilian staffers.

"Everything we do at AKO is based on the delegated authority model," said Fritzsche. "They're not always IT experts. We constantly stress that you don't need to be an IT expert to use AKO. When you build a Web page on AKO, there's not a word of HTML anywhere in sight."

The Army's push to get users to embrace AKO has resulted in about 800,000 log-ins on a typical day. Defense is expanding the Army program to become the network portal for the entire department, dubbed Defense Knowledge Online. More than 100,000 non-Army users have been added from other military services and Defense agencies.

Defense officials chose to build on Army Knowledge Online for the departmentwide portal because it uses the most efficient technologies and has the largest user base, according to Fritzsche. "They looked across the department to all these different services building portals and said, 'Why not try to converge the efforts on a single solution and get some cost savings?' " he said. "They looked at a couple solutions out there and determined that AKO was the most mature with the most complete set of services."