Tools and Services

In the IETF, 'tool' is used an umbrella term for applications, software and online services that have been custom written by the IETF or the IETF community.

Datatracker

Datatracker is the IETF's document management and workflow system, containing data about IETF documents, working groups, meetings, agendas, minutes, presentations, and more. Datatracker is used by I-D authors, reviewers, WG Chairs, the IESG and others to manage documents.

IETF participants are required to have a Datatracker account in order to register for an IETF meeting, or carry out any of the other functions or use any of the other tools that require authentication. Everyone with an account has a an auto-generated home page showing the documents they have authored and other useful information.

Datatracker includes a number of features that are described as tools:

• The I-D Submission Tool is used by participants to submit an Internet-Draft.
• The IPR Disclosure Page provides an interface for submitting an intellectual property rights (IPR) disclosure or updating an existing IPR disclosure. It also allows a user to view all IPR disclosures that have been submitted to the IETF, and to Search for IPR disclosures by various search parameters.
• The Liaison Statement Tool is for Liaison Managers to submit liaison statements, as an alternative to email submission.
• The Interim Meeting Request tool allows authorised people to submit all of the information required to schedule an interim meeting. Separately, a request to use Meetecho can be made and included in the interim meeting request, or the URL for another conferencing tool such as Webex can be included.
• The IETF Meeting Session Request Tool is for authorised people to request a session for their Working Group, Research Group, Area Group or other formal group at the upcoming IETF Meeting.

Email, mailing lists, and mailarchives

Mailarchive provides a searchable interface to the archives of all public IETF mailing lists, going back decades. Every message has a unique URL allowing it to be individually referenced. 

The Mailing List Request page is for requesting a new mailing list be hosted at the ietf.org domain or transferring an existing mailing list to IETF control. The page provides guidelines on use.

The IETF’s email system, which is used by IETF, IRTF, IAB and RFC-Editor email lists, uses the DMARC [RFC7489] security scheme to deter email forgery, which is often used by senders of spam.

Author Tools

To support Internet-Draft authors there is a central authors documentation site and on that there is a catalog of individual document processing tools that can be downloaded and run locally.

For convenience, most of these tools can be used directly on the author tools web service.

Other tools

Meeting network and technology provides details of the tools used specifically during IETF meetings.