Versit Consortium

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The Versit Consortium was a multivendor initiative founded by Apple Computer, AT&T, IBM and Siemens in the early 1990s in order to create Personal Data Interchange (PDI) technology, open specifications for exchanging personal data over the Internet, wired and wireless connectivity and Computer Telephony Integration (CTI). The Consortium started a number of projects to deliver open specifications aimed at creating industry standards.

[edit] Computer Telephony Integration

One of the most ambitious project of the Consortium 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 build 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 and Michael Bayer from Apple Computer, James L. Knight from AT&T (then Lucent Technologies) and Tom Miller from Siemens.

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.

[edit] Personal Data Interchange

In 1995, the Consortium proposed and went on to create the vCard and vCalendar technologies. vCards were intended to make it easy for many people using computers connected to the Internet to exchange contact information, while vCalendars 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, a trade association headed by the original Versit Consortium members, which continues to maintain and develop the standards.

This was later extended to create technologies for VToDo, to transfer ToDo details between computing devices, and vBookmark, to transfer URLs between computing devices.