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                         March 8, 2002

WASHINGTON (Army News Service) -- A "collaboration center" to let Army Knowledge Online customers hold Internet conferences with other users has become a standard AKO feature.

The center serves as a "chat room" for users to discuss specific Army issues. These rooms enable an AKO user and other individuals to talk to each other simultaneously.

"This is part of the continuing evolution of AKO," said Col. Robert L. Coxe, G-6’s chief technical officer. "We wanted to give soldiers a place to either exchange concepts and ideas or to be able to discuss a particular document online."

Since chat is a part of AKO Instant Messenger, users must be running AKO Instant Messenger to chat. By creating a chat room as a "moderated" room, only operators and moderators can participate, or "speak," there.

"When you create a chat room, you decide who does what," said David Hale, AKO’s chief technician.

Coxe added that the Collaboration Center is both secure and persistent. For instance, when a chat is completed, its text does not vanish. Instead the chat room administrator can edit, save and archive the session as a text document for later viewing by anyone given access.

A systems administrator with the 1st Armored Division in Germany recently praised the AKO collaboration center as, "pretty damn cool."

While the Collaboration Center was designed to help soldiers in coordinating documents, concepts or information papers, Coxe said he really had no preconceived notion on how it might be used in practice.

"We are going to be surprised," he said. "Soldiers have an amazing way of figuring out practical uses for themselves independent of what we designers might think."

For example, Coxe said, soldiers are using the chat rooms to conduct after-action reviews. He also described how some military police use it for briefing off-duty shifts online. Soldiers in those off-duty shifts participate from home or remote computer workstations, rather than assembling at the station.

The Collaboration Center’s conference rooms complement the AKO Instant Messenger, which allows users to communicate through a Web browser with other Bantu Messenger users [the AKO default standard], and users of ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger and MSN Messenger on Windows, Macintosh and Unix. An instant message is a private, two-way communication online between a user and others.

Hale said AKO Instant Messenger is the only messenger that allows users to send instant messages to users on ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Bantu.

"AKO Instant Messenger requires no software to install, and all settings are stored on AKO’s servers," he said.

AKO Instant Messenger is a secure means to maintain privacy, Hale said, because it uses an encrypted protocol between client and server.

"Users can be sure that messages sent between AKO Instant Messenger users are not being read by other people," Hale said.

Nevertheless, AKO Instant Messenger works unbelievably well through firewalls and proxy servers, he explained.

"In many cases, AKO Instant Messenger is the only way to connect to ICQ, MSN and Yahoo!," Hale added.