Now is the right time to close those Army Knowledge Online (AKO) accounts for those who are also using Department of Defense (DoD) Email Enterprise (EE) due to redundancy.
Currently, there are more than 534 provisioned EE email accounts divided into Army, JS, DISA, and EUCOM. The drive behind the initiative to eliminate email accounts redundancy and storage is the outcome of recently concluded cost-benefit analysis.
The AKO email accounts deactivation for about 430K users, who are considered a specific AKO DoD EE users subset, of EE will take effect on 1 October 2012. The AKO deactivation process will continue as the users ‘email accounts are migrated to DoD EE.
Nonetheless, AKO users email addresses will still be valid though the emails bound for such will be forwarded to the DoD EE accounts automatically. There are just three aspects will be eliminated namely main interface, mail handling capability, and email storage. Storage of those closed accounts will then be re-purposed into AKO portal’s lifecycle storage.
Such an initiative is intended for 430K Army users only, and whose accounts are already transitioned into the DoD EE. Thereby, this will not affect the following:
- Deployed soldiers
- Army Reserve soldiers
- Army National Guard solders
- Family members
- Retirees
- Sponsored accounts
A notification will be sent to AKO users, and should they opt to request for reconsideration, they have to send an email to this address: ako.transition@us.army.mil.
On this note, the fact that DoD EE is the most right thing to do cannot be emphasized enough. DoD EE, other than reducing redundancy, may lead to a more effective operation and improved security more so because the action will enforce a two-factor authentication process.
We wish to thank our mission partners worldwide for their continued effort and support for making such a colossal undertaking a reality!
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