The German Association and Network for Critical Communications (PMeV) has founded a task force for BOS messenger standardization. The new task force aims at providing a forum for the discourse on harmonization, standardization as well as cross-border and inter-organizational functionality of messenger technology for public security authorities and organizations (BOS). Jan Bonde Hennies (stashcat) was unanimously elected Chairman of the new task force. Representatives of 15 member companies announced their interest in an active participation in the group.   

Organizations increasingly rely on Messenger

With the increasing digitization and networking of police work, the BOS environment faces the challenge to ensure efficient and reliable communication and data exchange between the different public security authorities and organizations. Messenger services are being increasingly used as a viable solution. However, they tend to be used only within the organizations and without networking. The communication landscape of the German police and other BOS is characterized by a large number of heterogeneous Messenger communication systems. This applies to both the police forces of the Federal States and higher-order institutions such as the German Federal Police, State Criminal Investigation Offices as well as further police stakeholders and all public security authorities and organizations. “In the last few years, the importance of messaging services and fast exchange of large data volumes has strongly grown within these organizations. However, a lack of interfaces between the different systems currently impedes an efficient inter-authority and cross-border communication using broadband services such as messaging. Missing standardization at protocol and functional level additionally impairs system interoperability”, said Jan. B. Hennies with regard to the challenge for the new task force.

Solution approach and objective of the task force  

Reacting to these challenges, the PMeV takes the initiative to promote harmonization, standardization, interoperability as well as cross-border and inter-organizational functionality of Messenger technologies. The different systems and tools must be determined before examining the possibility to create common interfaces permitting overarching communication in the federative sense. The task force aims at discussing standards for federative messaging and data exchange in a dialog with BOS and economy stakeholders. 

The dialog shall improve the interoperability of different systems and enable efficient inter-authority and cross-border communication exchange. Just like with the standardization of the BOS digital radio connector, the provider industry can again take the initiative to actively shape homogeneous communication. For this purpose, the Association will bring together stakeholder groups from politics, users and industry and create a platform for successful discourse.