The SIP Forum is member-driven. What we do is up to you. Learn how to advance the industry — Read our Request below!

The newly-elected Board of the SIP Forum met recently to discuss the state of the SIP industry, and what things the SIP Forum and its members can do in order "... to advance the adoption of products and services based on SIP," which is the mission of the Forum.

We (the Board) have some suggestions, and this is a request for you to respond and share your thoughts about them, and to solicit your help in some work we believe needs done.

HISTORY

It seems inarguable that the most significant things the Forum has accomplished historically include:

• SIPit events, which have significant impact in the SIP industry;
• SIPNOC conferences, which provide a vital meeting place for engineers, network architects and service provider operational personnel to gain insights and best practices on SIP deployment from their peers;
• General promotion of SIP through our website, mailing lists, and our various marketing activities, including editorial, speaking, and other promotional activities.
• and the evolution of the SIPconnect Technical Recommendation (for SIP IP-PBX <---> service provider trunking), and the process we have in place to facilitate creating more Technical Recommendations, such as our User Agent Configuration, and Fax-over-IP initiatives.

These are things we expect to continue to do.

PLAN

The Board's general sense is that there are (at least) six areas that could obviously benefit from industry attention:

1. Develop an initiative to solve interoperability issues in Unified Communications deployments
2. Develop an initiative to solve interoperability issues in Video and Telepresence deployments
3. Help evangelize the how, when, and why of SIP over TLS (or some other security mechanism);
4. Begin Phase 2 of the UA-Config Task Group, which entails the development of a common data profile for SIP end-point configuration -- an activity that is now underway in our User Agent Configuration Task Group;
5. Develop an initiative to solve interoperability issues in IPv6 deployment (especially with respect to SIP end points)
6. Continue the advancement of the SIPconnect Technical Recommendation, an activity that most recently generated SIPconnect version 1.1., and expand the associated SIPconnect Compliant Program with a test-suite to benchmark compliance to the specification.

Whether these are, in fact, the most pressing issues can be debated. However, even if there are other issues, these are certainly worthy of attention.

REQUEST

We (the Board) humbly invite you to offer your thoughts about how we, as a volunteer-based member association, can attack these issues. At a minimum, tell us your thoughts about what you think the most important issue is by taking our poll (see the upper-right corner of this web page.)

Better yet, use our mailing lists to have a serious discussion about what we can do.

The Board has some ideas of its own about how to address the last item (4). We'll come up with a specific plan on how to advance both the written document, and to test implementations at future SIPit events. We'll then share that plan with various subsets of the entire membership where seems like the work needs to get done (e.g. the technical WG, marketing WG, test event WG, etc.)

But we invite YOU to help create progress on the other issues.

There could be "marketing" (communications), or technical, or bully-pulpit style actions that we could take for any or all of the above. What should we do, where? And who is willing to work on it with/for us?

This is your Forum. We are a vehicle you can use to help solve your SIP problems. We invite you to leverage the Forum by participating in the discussion. We look forward to your insights.