UCIF Jumps In: "Feel the Pain, Fix the Problem"UCIF Jumps In: "Feel the Pain, Fix the Problem"

The Unified Communications Interoperability Forum is pulling together an ad hoc interoperability test today. The goal is modest--see if different clients can hold a meeting--but it'll still be a tall order.

The Unified Communications Interoperability Forum, the newly-launched group dedicated, as the name suggests, to working on UC interoperability, is wasting no time on making a public effort to jump-start the sluggish pace of UC interop--today (Tuesday, August 17), from 9 AM - 10 AM Pacific time, they're going to try and break some new ground.

They're going to try and hold a meeting with different clients running different protocols.

I spoke last night with Bernard Aboba, chairman of the UCIF board, who's coordinating the test. Basically, the UCIF leadership went out to the member companies and others, including some corporate users, and asked them to participate. Bernard expects about 75 to 100 participants.

The aim is to get users with a variety of clients to be able to talk together via IM/presence, and use these connections as the basis for testing whether more advanced types of sessions can be set up among the participants--video, for example. The group hopes to test SIP, XMPP and its multimedia extension, Jingle.

"We wanted to have the widest variety of clients possible," Bernard said. I asked him specifically whether the test will include clients from conspicuously non-UCIF members like Cisco, Avaya and IBM, and while Bernard wouldn't mention specific names, he did say, "There will be equipment in use from a variety of vendors.... It's whatever anyone brings to the party. So if it's Brand X, that's what they'll bring."

Bernard played down both the formality of the test and the likely outcomes, saying it's just an attempt to get the lay of the land as UCIF begins its work.

"It's not a full-scale Internet test," he said. "We're just trying to get a sense of where we are. It's helping us get a sense of where the problems lie."

And every indication is that the problems lie pretty much everywhere you can imagine. "The problems are so deepseated we have to start with something," he said. The organizers hope to emerge from today's test with an informal score on a scale of 2 to 10 to characterize the scope of the challenge.

At least as of this first test, UCIF seems to be consciously echoing the ethic of the Internet Engineering Task force, with its motto of "rough consensus and running code." In his blog post announcing today's test, Bernard writes, "In general, the UCIF philosophy is 'feel the pain, fix the problem.'"

Today is likely to be a painful day for the participants, but hopefully it will also wind up looking like a kind of new beginning as well. We'll follow up and report on the results.