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Where are the best places to apply collaboration technology? The Defense Department has chosen it for some key tasks: collaborative situation assessment, course-of-action selection and execution, mission rehearsal and training, and after-action review.

To help achieve these Defense tasks, MITRE is leading the Multimedia and Collaboration Working Group, which establishes joint cross-service requirements and recommends collaborative tools for the Defense Information Infrastructure (DII) Common Operating Environment. This DII Common Operating Environment is an architecture that integrates and builds software to guarantee interoperability among joint service applications.

As part of its assessment, the working group evaluates COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) collaboration tools, keeping in mind their potential for cross-platform support, functionality, and standards compliance. MITRE is piloting the tools to assess application interoperability, integration with legacy infrastructure, performance, networking impact, and security.

Because DII users need to operate across platforms, operating systems, and applications; common standards are crucial for ensuring interoperability among policy makers, war fighters, analysts, and coalition partners. International standards for data sharing (T.120) and for conferencing (H.323) over networks based on the Internet Protocol are greatly evolving and gaining support from commercial industry.

For detailed descriptions of the tools that the MITRE-led working group is testing and of the standards process they are undergoing, see Collaboration Environments for the Defense Information Infrastructure.

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For more information, please contact Mark Maybury using the employee directory.

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