The day after the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, Army CIO Lt. Gen. Steven Boutelle ordered an online assistance center. Three hours later, a Katrina information center opened on AKO, providing a virtual community center where Army, Reserve, and National Guard members and their families could contact one another and find financial and housing assistance.

The military has big plans for AKO. Last year Boutelle and Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Croom, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), decided to expand the AKO into DKO (Defense Knowledge Online) to include all of the services and Defense Department agencies.

The goal is a single portal for all of the military who will use an SOA to deliver the AKO services that have already proven themselves, as well as newer collaboration capabilities using IBM's Sametime suite, which DISA recently licensed to provide amenities such as Web conferencing, white board tools, application sharing, broadcasting, chat, and audio and video capabilities to soldiers.

"[DKO] will also provide a cost reduction across the DoD by leveraging enterprise buying power of the DoD versus each service and agency buying and maintaining separate portals," says Marvin Wages, deputy chief of the knowledge management division at the Army CIO's office.

It could take longer than planned for this to happen, however. Initial expectations had the first version of DKO launching this summer, but budget problems, along with ensuring that the AKO architecture can scale to the expected number of DKO users, has put the start off to a time yet to be decided.