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New Collaboration Activities in the H.323 Forum

October 5, 2009

The H.323 Forum, which was created under the auspices of the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) and open to public participation, has launched a new initiative to define new features and functionality for the H.323 multimedia communication system through a suite of new specification documents called "Open Community Specifications".

These new documents will describe behavior or define new functionality that goes beyond the currently-defined functionality standardized by the ITU. Working with other members of the H.323 Forum through an open collaborative process, any vendor or open source developer may define new protocol extensions to H.323 or describe system or functional behavior. The latter classification of documents is akin to traditional white papers.

As documents that define new functionality for H.323 are progressed, participants will work to reach a rough consensus on the content and behavior. The ultimate objective is to define new extensions that will be implemented by multiple participants and demonstrate protocol interoperability.

The work in the H.323 Forum will be coordinated with the IMTC's Conferencing Interoperability Activity Group working group, which provides a forum for IMTC member companies to cooperate and pool resources on H.323, security, quality of service and other issues of common interest. This coordination will help to ensure proper interoperability between implementations and also serve as a venue for launching possible formal standardization of defined protocol extensions in the ITU.

If you are interested to participate by implementing extensions, defining new extensions, or otherwise engaging in the development of these new Open Community Specifications, please visit the H.323 Forum's Open Community Specifications web page for more information.