Posted on Mar 25, 2014
SGT William B.
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I'm seeing a lot of questions and comments directed at the difficulty of accessing/completing mandatory online training through the various platforms that the Army has developed over the years.

I'm curious though: how do such woefully inefficient and poorly built applications manage to be purchased and implemented in the first place?  How is the development funded?  Who develops it all?  Also, why do we have so many different platforms (ALMS, JKO, SkillSoft, the IA website)?  Is it not reasonable to conglomerate under one platform?
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SFC Communications Chief (S6)
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The majority of them have SSO (single sign on) thats about as good as it needs to be. Having it all run by one entity, it most likely wouldn't work at all. 

In the Era of shared drives; I publish a depository of commonly used forms into a location easily accessible by me, and easily relayed to others. Others decide that they don't like my location, they copy the entire contents and drop them into their own private file. Others still, despise accessing the Shared Drive in general and copy the contents onto each computer they use on a somewhat regular basis. 
I look through the Shared drive again and notice the dramatic increase in space taken up. One day i do a random search for a form number and notice the same form in 20 different locations in my units folder. Inefficient and annoyance don't begin to account for my thought process.......

Bad analogy as the majority of these services offer DIFFERENT courses. Single sign on is good but if your account is compromised, they have access to everything.  Each site having them own separate site isn't the issue. perhaps we need to publish yet another site that has links to all of the other sites? 

I use LIW to access the latest TM's, access fedlog to ensure I'm requesting actual items instead of what someone told me that nsn belongs to. I use PM FBCB2, to access tm's for all BFT related equipment as they decided not to publish their manuals through Army channels (annoying to say the least, but at least their information is accurate). I use s6.mil to find tm's and training for the plethora of contracted items that may or may not have been in use for the last decade and haven't made it onto ETMs. I access the Harris Website as they don't entrust the Army with their TM's, (have you tried reading one of those things?) after almost 10 years of using AN/PRC-148 they FINALLY have an Army Sanctioned TM and I no longer have to utilize the Thales website. 

Bottom line: if we had but one source of all of our online training, can you imagine the red tape needed to go through for the different sections to update their training when needed? much easier and timely for them to just utilize their own hosted site. 
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SGT William B.
SGT William B.
10 y
"Perhaps we need to publish yet another site that has links to all of the other sites?"


AKO was originally supposed to function as that centralized location.  Unfortunately, the search function it has is *terrible*. 

You make a lot of fair points; Army IT is convoluted when it comes to making changes (ex. the Army's migration to Enterprise Email from AKO mail).  Also, centralizing into one platform would basically guarantee that a ridiculous amount of bandwidth needs to be allocated to it.

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SFC Communications Chief (S6)
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Enterprise merged Conus mail and Ako mail. It somewhat had some centralizing/ money saving feature. And AKO is hardly what I'd call easy to navigate. 
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