Overview#
When a major incident crosses jurisdictional lines, a city's emergency operations centre, the national police service, and a partner agency across the border all need the same operational picture at the same moment. Without a shared workspace, teams operate from separate intelligence feeds, briefings arrive hours late, and commanders make decisions on stale information. The War Room and Partner Briefing module provides a secure, multi-tenant digital workspace where allied agencies can share live incident data, stream video from field assets, co-author situation reports, and brief partners in real time, all without requiring a partner to have access to the host agency's full investigation environment.
A war room is a distinct, purpose-scoped collaboration space created for a specific incident or operation. Invited agencies join under their own credentials and see only the layers of information the host has explicitly shared. The host team can stream drone footage and body-worn camera feeds directly into the room, broadcast live activity updates from the common operating picture, and generate point-in-time situation reports (SitReps) for leadership or external partners at any stage of the incident. When the operation concludes, the room is archived with a complete, immutable audit record of every action, access event, and published briefing.
Key Features#
- Shared Real-Time Activity Feed: All invited partner agencies see a live, chronologically ordered incident log. Activity updates, resource movements, and operational decisions are broadcast to the room as they occur, giving every participant the same current picture without manual redistribution.
- Secure Video and Sensor Streaming: Drone footage, body-worn camera streams, and sensor overlays are streamed directly into the war room over an encrypted WebRTC channel. Partners receive the feed within their granted access layer and do not gain access to other live video sources in the host environment.
- Automated SitRep Generation: At any point during an incident, the host can generate a point-in-time situation report assembled from selected entities, events, and geospatial annotations. The SitRep is published as a W3C JSON-LD artifact with its own lifecycle, so partners can consume it with standard tooling and it is preserved as an auditable record independent of the live incident graph.
- Granular Access Layer Control: The host defines which information layers each partner agency can see. Geospatial overlays, resource tracking, evidence streams, and intelligence summaries are each governed independently, so a partner receives exactly what the operational context requires and no more.
- Multi-Agency Identity Federation: Partners join using their own agency identity provider. The platform's federated authentication accepts credentials from external SAML and OpenID Connect identity providers, so partners do not need a separate account in the host environment and authentication is continuously verified for the duration of the session.
- Classification Enforcement: Each war room carries a classification marking and each shared layer carries its own sensitivity level. The platform enforces that a partner user only receives content at or below their confirmed clearance, making mixed-classification rooms safe to open to a coalition workforce.
- Co-Authoring and Annotation: Participants can annotate geospatial features, comment on activity feed items, and co-author briefing documents within the room. All edits are attributed, timestamped, and visible to the full participant group in real time.
- Immutable Audit Trail: Every join, leave, view, annotation, video access event, and published briefing is written to an immutable audit record with the acting user, agency, timestamp, and classification. This satisfies post-incident review, legal disclosure, and EDF and PESCO compliance requirements for multi-national data sharing.
Use Cases#
- Multi-Agency Counter-Terrorism Operations: A joint task force spanning national police, border agencies, and international partners maintains a single operational picture in the war room during an active operation, with each agency seeing only the intelligence layers relevant to their mandate.
- Major Event Security Coordination: The security commander for a large public event opens a war room for police, medical teams, transport operators, and venue staff. All parties see the same shared picture and receive immediate activity updates as the event unfolds, replacing a chain of radio relays and delayed briefings.
- Cross-Border Emergency Response: A natural disaster that crosses a national border requires rapid coordination between civil protection agencies in two or more countries. The war room provides a shared incident space with federated authentication so foreign responders can join under their own credentials within minutes.
- Command Briefing for Senior Leadership: During a protracted incident, the operations team generates a SitRep briefing package for command leadership. The package captures the state of the incident at that moment as a portable, standards-compliant artifact that leadership can review without requiring direct access to the live war room.
- Coalition Intelligence Sharing: Coalition partners operating in separate tenants share a common operational picture layer for a joint operation. Each partner contributes annotations and receives the combined picture scoped to the classification level the host has authorised.
Integration#
The War Room module connects directly to the common operating picture so that geospatial overlays, resource positions, and sensor fusions already present in the incident environment are available for selective inclusion in a war room without manual re-entry. Video and sensor feeds are sourced through the platform's media streaming layer and delivered into the room using the same WebRTC infrastructure used across the broader collaboration environment. SitRep packages generated in the war room are published through the Briefing Package module as W3C JSON-LD artifacts, making them shareable with partners and consumable by any standards-compliant JSON-LD processor. Partner agency access is authenticated through the platform's federated identity service, which accepts SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect credentials, and all war room operations respect the same role-based permission model and organisation isolation boundaries that govern every other collaboration feature.
Open Standards#
- WebRTC (W3C and IETF): Real-time audio, video, and data channels for all in-room media streaming, including drone feeds and body-worn camera streams, are delivered over WebRTC using DTLS-SRTP encrypted peer connections.
- DTLS-SRTP (RFC 5764): All WebRTC media transmitted into and within a war room is encrypted using DTLS key exchange over SRTP, as mandated by the WebRTC security model, ensuring media confidentiality in transit.
- WebSocket (RFC 6455): Live activity feed updates, annotation broadcasts, presence events, and room signalling are delivered over persistent, encrypted WebSocket connections so all participants receive changes in real time.
- W3C JSON-LD: SitRep briefing packages generated from a war room are encoded as W3C JSON-LD documents, giving partners a self-describing, machine-readable artifact they can process with any conformant JSON-LD tooling without requiring access to the host platform.
- SAML 2.0 (OASIS): Federated identity for partner agency login supports SAML 2.0 assertions, allowing partners to authenticate using their own enterprise identity provider without provisioning accounts in the host environment.
- OpenID Connect Core 1.0 (OIDC): Partner agencies whose identity infrastructure uses OpenID Connect can join a war room with their existing credentials, with the platform accepting OIDC ID tokens issued by the partner's authorisation server.
- OAuth 2.0 (RFC 6749) and JSON Web Tokens (RFC 7519): All war room API operations, including room creation, participant management, feed access, and SitRep publication, are authorised with signed JWT bearer tokens issued by the platform's identity service.
- GeoJSON (RFC 7946): Geospatial annotations and map features shared within a war room are exchanged in GeoJSON, ensuring that geometry shared between agencies round-trips without lossy conversion and is compatible with any GeoJSON-capable mapping tool.
Availability#
- Enterprise Plan: Included
- Professional Plan: Available with a limited number of concurrent war rooms and partner invitations; contact your account team for capacity options.
Last Reviewed: 2026-05-26