The Importance of Presence Integration and UC Interoperability
Presence, smresence, what’s the big deal with Presence? Presence is all about connections. If you were to ask a user what presence is, you would probably get a lot of different answers: Presence is telling whether someone is available, online in the case of IM, or in a meeting until 3PM in the case of Microsoft Outlook, etc. Presence equals efficiency, especially for an end user. Contact Centers are the ultimate proving ground for a company’s ROI.
Presence allows anyone not just Contact Centers the ability to pull in enterprise resources to resolve any issue immediately. Efficiency increases when a company can eliminate phone tag, by letting users know, through device presence, if someone is on the phone or available to accept a phone call. Imagine the possibilities if you could integrate all forms of presence (IM, device presence and email) and federation. End users desperately need this type of UC interoperability.
Earlier this year Blair Pleasant wondered about the future of UC without federation. While Federation might be number one on many people’s list; I think she needed to include the importance of presence. Blair wishes for federation, but right now Presence makes my life more efficient because I am not playing phone tag, and I do not foresee the big 3 playing nice in the sand box so federation is way down on my list. Nothing ruins my day more than having left a voice mail at the beginning of the day and by the EOB I haven’t heard from my contact, only to hear that they have been in a meeting in my own building all day. Presence can make my day, by telling me through MS Outlook, that my contact has a lunch break at 1:00, so I will walk on over to the meeting and catch him in the hallway. A much more efficient use of my time than waiting on a return call from a voice mail message I left at the beginning of the day.
I would consider Presence Integration to be more important than Federation when it comes to UC interoperability between multi vendor platforms like Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, such as letting an end user know when the contact in your IM client is “in a call”. While many would scoff at that possibility, I call that the “Ultimate Presence Experience”, eliminating phone tag, ensuring reach-ability, eliminating email latency, and eliminating the frustration of how can I connect with someone now. I continue to lead the charge for efficiency through presence, and what better way for all of us to keep our New Year’s Resolution than with UC Interoperability and Integrated Presence!!
Mark:
I would certainly agree with you that the future of UC is based on presence, and maybe i didn’t explicitly state it, but the reason we need federation is to have presence integration. Without federation, we would just be able to see the presence status of people within our organization. Without federation, we couldn’t see the presence status of partners, customers, suppliers, etc. That’s why I feel federation is so important - it expands presence outside of the enterprise.
In the context of UC, presence is primarily useful to real-time contact initiators (callers, IM initiators) rather than recipients. For contact initiators who want to simply send a one way message, presence information doesn’t make a difference. Since “rich” text messaging is increasingly taking over both the mobile device and desktop in business communications, messaging is becoming a major gateway for “contextual” call initiation (”click-to-call”) responses.
The need to have a voice conversation will often arise when looking at information and messages, and any delays in getting delivery of those asynchronous messages and information attachments will have a ripple effect on any real-time responses. That is traditionally why people have made phone calls rather than just send an email, not because they want to have a two-way voice conversation, but just because they want to insure timely delivery of information.
So, perhaps contact initiators/respondents need another kind of information about the recipient before they choose a mode of contact. That would not just be voice telephony or IM presence availability, but any means of timely message notification that the recipient has actively available, e.g., mobile SMS, push email, current desktop activity for immediate online email notification, etc. Message notification/delivery information could be translated into some indication of likelihood of timely “urgent” message retrieval (immediately, within an hour, sometime today, tomorrow, etc.).
The payoff would be less effort for contact initiators and less real-time disruptions for recipients. “Voice mail jail” is already starting to turn into requests to send an email instead of leaving a voice message, so telephony presence and real-time availability information need to be supplemented by practical information to message senders about the recipient’s ability to get “urgent” asynchronous messages in a timely manner. Note: This is not just a matter of “preferences!”
Just a thought. Comments anyone?