The versit Consortium was a multivendor initiative founded by

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, IBM and

Siemens Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad. The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', '' ...

in the early 1990s in order to create Personal Data Interchange (PDI) technology, open specifications for exchanging personal data over the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

, wired and wireless connectivity and Computer Telephony Integration ( CTI). The

Consortium A consortium (plural: consortia) is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for ...

started a number of projects to deliver open specifications aimed at creating industry standards.

Computer Telephony Integration

One of the most ambitious projects of the

was the Versit CTI Encyclopedia (VCTIE), a 3,000 page, 6 volume set of specifications defining how computer and telephony systems are to interact and become interoperable. The Encyclopedia was built on existing technologies and specifications such as ECMA's call control specifications, TSAPI and industry expertise of the core technical team. The volumes are: * Volume 1, Concepts & Terminology * Volume 2, Configurations & Landscape * Volume 3, Telephony Feature Set * Volume 4, Call Flow Scenarios * Volume 5, CTI Protocols * Volume 6, Versit TSAPI Appendices include: * Versit TSAPI header file * Protocol 1 ASN.1 description * Protocol 2 ASN.1 description * Versit Server Mapper Interface header file * Versit TSDI header file The core Versit CTI Encyclopedia technical team was composed of David H. Anderson and Marcus W. Fath from IBM,

Frédéric Artru Frédéric and Frédérick are the French versions of the common male given name Frederick. They may refer to: In artistry: * Frédéric Back, Canadian award-winning animator * Frédéric Bartholdi, French sculptor * Frédéric Bazille, Impress ...

and Michael Bayer from

, James L. Knight and Steven Rummel from

(then

Lucent Technologies Lucent Technologies, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the divestiture of the former AT&T Technologies business u ...

), Tom Miller from

, and consultants Ellen Feaheny and Charles Hudson. Upon completion, the Versit CTI Encyclopedia was transferred to the ECTF and has been adopted in the form of ECTF C.001. This model represents the basis for the ECTF's call control efforts. Though the Versit CTI Encyclopedia ended up influencing many products, there was one full compliant implementation of the specifications that was brought to market:

Odisei Odisei S.A. was a French company based in Sophia-Antipolis, France that developed the first Internet protocol private branch exchange (IP-PBX) software solution hosted by carriers.Frédéric Artru launches Odisei in Sophia-Antipolis It was founded ...

, a French company founded by team member

developed the IntraSwitch IP-PBX.

was later acquired by semiconductor company

8x8 8x8 Inc. is an American provider of Voice over IP products. Its products include cloud-based voice, contact center, video, mobile and unified communications for businesses. Since 2018, 8x8 manages Jitsi. History The company was founded in 1987 ...

, which deployed the IntraSwitch technology as the second largest standalone U.S. VoIP service provider.

Personal Data Interchange

In 1995, the

proposed and went on to create the and technologies. were intended to make it easy for many people using computers connected to the

to exchange contact information, while were intended to make it easy for people to swap scheduling information. In 1996, all rights to these technologies were transferred to the

Internet Mail Consortium The Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) was an organization between 1996 and 2002 that claimed to be the only international organization focused on cooperatively managing and promoting the rapidly expanding world of electronic mail on the Internet. The ...

, an organization founded by

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, which continued to maintain the standards until 2002, when the IMC ceased its activities. This was later extended to create technologies for VToDo, to transfer ToDo details between computing devices, and , to transfer URLs between computing devices.

External links

Minčių Sodas - Archive - Thinking Powerfully - Number 184
(Andrius Kulikauskas' reasoning for opposing

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

as the format for )
CompTIA ECTF group - Repository of the Versit CTI Encyclopedia

www.imc.org/pdi
nbsp;— main PDI standards, original 1996's description of

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and

vCalendar The Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar) is a media type which allows users to store and exchange calendaring and scheduling information such as events, to-dos, journal entries, and free/busy information, an ...

. Computer networking {{compu-network-stub