Making Presence More UsefulMaking Presence More Useful

An elegant but unlikely scenario for interoperability, and the potential for "contextual collaboration."

The subject of presence came up at a few points during my time at Interop Las Vegas last week; it's clearly a function that no one is really satisfied with right now. The "red/yellow/green" model of presence indication is not granular enough, and really doesn't tell the potential user much that's useful. I heard a lot of people talking about how they use IM to "set up" an impromptu phone call--multiple people in multiple places said that they always IM someone to ask if that person is free to take a phone call. That's better than interrupting someone or being interrupted by a phone call, but supposedly presence is meant to tell you that information without you having to contact the other person at all.

One obvious problem with presence systems today is lack of interoperability, and on this subject, the most interesting comment I heard came from Craig Mathias of Farpoint Group. Craig, an old friend of ours here, chairs the Wireless and Mobility Track at Interop, and I shared the podium with him and with Steve Wylie, who runs TechWeb's Enterprise 2.0 event, and John Bartlett of NetForecast, who you all know as Enterprise Connect's resident network performance guru, especially as relates to video.

The session was called "The Future of Work," and that's a whole other story, but Craig's comment regarding presence was that he'd like to see some kind of centralized presence authority that everyone subscribes to--which I suggested could function kind of like a certificate authority in the security world. That way you could have truly federated presence that everyone could trust and that could function across user interfaces and media.

I will hasten to add that this will never, never happen. There is no possibility that the various vendors will agree to any such scheme, and surrender their control and potential for competitive advantage. But I thought Craig's idea was the most elegant solution to the problem I'd heard.

Given that we won't reach this level of ubiquity, there's still a lot that can be done to make presence more useful, a point that was brought home to me in a conversation I had with Tara Mahoney, GM for Applications and Soft Clients at Avaya. She told me one area of emphasis in Avaya’s R&D and work with its partners is what she called "contextual collaboration," which means the ability for the network to know and act upon information about a user's communications sessions.

In practice, what this means is that the back-end system should know who your most frequent collaborators are--who you communicate with the most, and in what modes--and through a combination of automation and user pre-configuration, ought to be able to automatically handle each communication in the most appropriate manner. This might have to do with how your regular workgroup does its work, or it might mean the system knows, from interacting with the corporate directory, who should get priority. So maybe the default setting is the current not-so-granular method of marking you as unavailable "red" if the system sees from your Outlook calendar that you're supposed to be in a meeting. On the other hand, "If it's [Avaya CEO] Kevin Kennedy [trying to reach her], it probably doesn't matter if you're in an Outlook meeting or not. It's not just your [communications] mode, it's how important is the person trying to reach you?"

The bottom line, Tara said, is that "There's a lot of context in the network that we don't extract" that could make presence richer if it could be brought to bear.

That seems to me to be one of the ways that enterprise communications systems can remain valuable to end users--if we think of "presence" not as a way to find out what someone's doing, but as a way to automate the process of negotiating the start of a communications session, in a way that's most efficient for both parties.