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+**COTAK Interagency Channels**
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+Hello and welcome to the Center of Excellence training series on TAK. In this tutorial we will cover the concepts of Mutual Aid and Interagency channels, and later, how to set up an interagency channel. Let’s get started.
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+Before we dive into the how, let's quickly talk about the why with some examples. First, let’s cover the difference between a mutual aid channel and an interagency channel.
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+A mutual aid channel is a channel created by the COTAK program team  and is automatically offered to multiple agencies within a geographic area such as a county, region, or the entire state of Colorado. MAC Channels will display in the channels tool of your TAK app. Turning a MAC Channel on will share your location and allow you to see the location of any other COTAK user on that same channel, even if they are from a different agency than your own. For example, COTAK users in a suburban Denver area Police Department  may have access to  an Adams County MAC Channel, Denver Metro area MAC channel, and Colorado Law Enforcement MAC Channel. If an incident in Adams county required additional assistance from neighboring public safety agencies all participating Adams county first responders, including fire, law, and emergency management agency members  may turn their county MAC channel on and will instantly begin sending and receiving location information. Because these channels are permanent and preconfigured for your use, they are oftentimes the best option for interoperability or Mutual Aid with neighboring agencies.
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+So, what’s an interagency channel and why would you want to use it? An interagency channel is a highly customizable and specific way to grant location sharing between two or more agencies by taking the membership list of multiple COTAK channels, and adding those members into an interagency channel.This is similar to a ‘patch’ between voice radio channels, but has some key differences.
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+Let me elaborate, let’s say we have two example law enforcement agencies: City Police Department and County Sheriffs Office. Well, the PD and SO each have a drug task force that commonly operate together. These users could use their COTAK county or state mac channel to interoperate, but their location is not supposed to be known by anyone outside of their task force. So rather than using a MAC channel, the administrators of their agencies can jointly create an interagency channel that only allows City Police Department DTF and Sheriffs Office DTF to see each other. This gives COTAK member agency administrators the power of enabling interoperability, rather than relying on the COTAK program team to create new specific MAC Channels. So why else might you want to use an interagency channel? Besides location security, you may want to create interagency channels if you are interoperating with nearby agencies on a continuous or daily basis in ways that don’t conform to a typical mutual aid plan. This is also a good option if you are looking for a higher level of admin control over what users across multiple agencies get access to a channel for interoperability. 
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+So you decided that you would like to create an interagency channel. Here’s how to do it. First, you and the other agencies you wish to interoperate with must decide who should host the interagency channel. Whoever hosts the channel has some extra responsibilities to invite agencies to join the channel and monitor what channels they add to it. Also, only the hosting agency can fully delete the interagency channel from COTAK if it is no longer needed. 
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+If you are going to host the interagency channel, start by logging into COTAK.GOV and navigating to your admin tools. Select the interagency channel tool and click on “create new interagency channel.” Select your agency from the dropdown menu. Then create a name for the new channel. The COTAK team recommends using a name that will be easily identifiable by participating agencies. Create a short description to display within the TAK apps. Be concise with this description. No more than 2 sentences. Then in the last box create a description for the COTAK website. Use this to describe the channel's purpose and participating groups. Once you are finished click create. 
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+You will be directed to the interagency channel manager. From here you will be able to edit the interagency channel information, connect agency channels, and invite other agencies to join. Right now you have the shell of an interagency channel that exists in the COTAK system, but no users have visibility or access to it. What we are going to do now is add a preexisting channel from your agency into the interagency channel. This might not make sense at first, let me explain how this system works.
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+The backend purpose of an interagency channel is to take two or more pre-existing COTAK channels, regardless of their agency owner,  and create a new channel containing the members of the pre-existing channels. So let’s say you have hand selected users that are currently in a DTF channel within your agency. You want them to interoperate with another agency's DTF channel. You will navigate to the interagency included channel tab and select your agency’s DTF channel and add it to the interagency channel. You will then go to invites and send the other agency an invitation to add their own channels to the interagency channel. Once they accept the invitation, they will then be able to add their own DTF channel. Now the members of both DTF channels live within the parent DTF Interagency channel, and users who have this interagency channel active in their TAK apps will begin to see each other when they turn the interagency channel on. Note that each agency’s existing DTF channel will continue to exist and will only grant access to users within each agency. Only turning the interagency channel on allows users from both agencies to see each other and interoperate.
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+Navigate to the Included Channels page, select include another channel and select the desired channels to be connected to the interagency parent. To invite another agency, simply navigate to the invites page and locate the desired agency and click submit. The respective agency will receive an invitation notification where it is then their job to accept the invitation and include the proper channels. 
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+If you are the invitee, access your invitation via the notifications viewer or the interagency channel admin tool. Accept the invitation and add channels via the included channels tab. If you would like to no longer share channels as the invitee, you may remove channels from this tab as well.
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+This also applies to the host of the interagency channel. Simply navigating to the included channels and selecting remove will delete the channel connection. The host may also remove invited agencies from accessing the interagency channel. Navigate to the invitations tab and click delete to revoke all connections to that agency. The channels owned by the invited agency will not be affected by this action, merely they will no longer be a part of the interagency channel.
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+This concludes our tutorial for COTAK Interagency Channels, powered by the Colorado Department of Public Safety and the Center of Excellence for Advanced Technology Aerial Firefighting. Thanks for watching\!