After many years of using a customized and specialized software for online collaboration in standards development SMPTE decided to move to set of tools which provide us with modern interfaces, better performance, and well documented API access to our data. Our new platform will be the first steps in an initiative called the Standards Knowledge Network (SKN). Our goal is to migrate to tools that allow controlled access to the SMPTE workings and knowledge across every aspect of the SMPTE organization. This move will result in a flexible, searchable system that can address our future needs for standards development and a much improved (i.e. usable) mobile experience. The following motive
- General move in the industry to more software development focused projects
- Move away from monolithic specialized software applications
- Move to commodity, microservices based applications in the cloud
- Improvements in performance
- Larger feature set which can be controlled by SMPTE
- Flexible structure with easily swappable applications
- General cost reduction
While we indent to at least build a minimal viable platform by the switch-over point in January 2021 to continue the SMPTE due process we strive to continue to improve the platform once the switch-over is behind us. This document will be continuously updated to provide guidance on how the SMPTE due process is implemented in Microsoft 365 (MS 365), Teams, GitHub and any other applications which form the SMPTE platform.