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Command addresses industry concerns U.S. Joint Forces Command’s (USJFCOM) leadership addressed concerns of its industry partners  following Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ recent recommendation to disestablish the command. • Comment on this article at USJFCOMLive

USJFCOM, Microsoft Corp. extend agreement for one year

After achieving successes in the first year, U. S. Joint Forces Command recently extended a cooperative research and development agreement with Microsoft Corp. to pursue more research to support a database of the latest enemy tactics, techniques and procedures which answers questions and provide training materials warfighters need.

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By MC2 (AW) Nikki Carter
USJFCOM Public Affairs

(NORFOLK, Va. - May 28, 2008) -- U.S Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) recently extended the cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with Microsoft Corp. and the command's Knowledge and Information Fusion Exchange (KnIFE) program for one year.
 
Army Col. Dave Belcher, KnIFE’s deputy chief, said the command extended the CRADA with Microsoft Corp. to finish some of the efforts which were created under the original agreement.

As part of the Joint Center for Operational Analysis, KnIFE receives questions from deployed units as well as units preparing to go to a theater of operations. Using a database of the latest enemy tactics, techniques and procedures, KnIFE personnel answer questions and provide training materials warfighters need.

The CRADA helped to enrich this service according to Belcher.

"We extended our CRADA with Microsoft because our experience in the first year of the CRADA has really paid off for us," Belcher said. "Some of the experimentations that we did, we actually moved into production to build into our websites. We want to continue the experimentation we laid out at the very beginning."

Belcher said the first year of the CRADA was deemed "successful because all experiments were closely aligned with our mission requirements. Therefore, successful experiments led to rapid technology insertion into KnIFE production computer systems."

He said USJFCOM experimented with some pre-release code developed for the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server platform and used it to build a production KnIFE portal.

Belcher said USJFCOM has two more experiments that the command would like to explore:

• Service-oriented architecture - represents a set of standards for integrating computer systems and computer applications over a diverse set of platforms and communication protocols.

• Business intelligence - relates to the mining of data, through the use of complex algorithms and visualization techniques, to determine relationships that might otherwise might be overlooked.

The needs of the warfighter are front and center in this agreement, according to Belcher.

"We hope to benefit from it by improving our support to the war fighter, by improving our technology insertion into our total operation that goes into all of our networks."