The Defense Collaboration Tool Suite (DCTS) is a flexible, integrated set of applications providing interoperable, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration capability to the Department of Defense’s (DoD) agencies, Combatant Commands and military services. The DCTS program identifies, fields and sustains a dynamic set of evolving standard collaboration tools that bridge between DoD and the Intelligence Community. These tools enhance simultaneous, ad hoc crisis and deliberate continuous operational action planning (vertically and horizontally) across operational theaters and other domains that provide operational units and defense organizations simultaneous access to real-time operational, tactical and administrative information.DCTS offers voice and video conferencing, document and application sharing, instant messaging and whiteboard functionality to support defense planning. It enables two or more distributed operational users to simultaneously participate in the mission planning process without the need to be co-located. With DCTS, military forces enjoy the capability to link various command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) and mission planning systems together on a common network to share data, conduct collaborative planning and collaboratively consult on information and data at various locations around the world. The DCTS strategy is to provide standards based services via COTS applications while supporting government off-the-shelf (GOTS) extensions needed to meet DoD Combatant Command/Service/Agency or team unique requirements. DCTS has demonstrated interoperability and compliance with the DoD collaboration interoperability criteria and has passed interoperability testing at the Joint Interoperability Testing Command (JITC). Initial fielding of DCTS V1.1.12 began in April 2002. By June 2003, DCTS V2.0 Phase I was installed at 101 sites worldwide, with another 56 sites to be installed in 2003 at all combatant commands, their major components and all the services. Fielding of DCTS V2.0 Phase II, with several user enhancements, is scheduled to begin in 4th Qtr FY 03.DCTS is available to Combatant Commands and all Department of Defense military services and agencies.

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