Rich Communication Suite phase 1

RCS (Rich Communication Suite) is a join industry effort aiming to speed up the evolution of mobile phone communication towards rich communication. The RCS initiative includes network operators, network and device vendors (Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, SK Telecom, Sony Ericsson and Samsung).

The main purpose of RCS is to allow interoperability between network vendors and software editors.

RCS phase 1 defines 4 main features:

1. Enhanced Address Book (Service capabilities, presence contacts information, Video Call, …)
2. Content Sharing (Video Share, Image Share, …)
3. File Transfer (based on OMA Simple 1.0 specifications)
4. Converged Messaging (base on OMA Simple 1.0 specifications)

The RCS Initiative has defined a core feature set, developed reference implementations of the services and conducted interoperability testing in multi-vendor environment.

In next posts I will introduce all features mentioned above and explain how they are used in IMS Clients (Mercuro).

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Suite
http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com/global/Press/Press+releases/news-archive/Rich_Communication_Suite_Initiative.htm