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!!

Tags: UC Information, Unified Communications Information by Mark Littlefield
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During a VoiceCon webinar Nancy Jamison and I presented along with Jim Krauetler of Genesys, I was asked to clarify a couple terms I had used. The following is intended to do a better job of explaining what these terms mean, both by definition and based on the impact they have on customers.

Tagging

“Tagging” allows UC users to “tag” contacts so they will receive a notification whenever the tagged contact becomes available for communication (IM, phone call, etc.). By “tagging” someone, you let the system know that you want to be notified when that person’s presence status changes to indicate the person is available for a phone call or IM. So, when the person’s status changes, the system will notify you so that you can make contact. Essentially, tagging reduces phone tag, voice mail or e-mail just to request a contact and makes it easier for people to connect, minimizing the communication overhead in managing tasks. Of course, many UC solutions also offer the ability to find alternate resources with equivalent knowledge, skills or authority, so that the transaction or task does not even have to wait for future availability, so Tagging should be seen as only one option for “optimizing business processes.”

Federation

In the UC world, federation is the term used for exchanging presence information among and between systems and devices, or the sharing of presence information across multiple presence systems. Federation makes it easier for UC users to connect with their colleagues, business partners, suppliers, and customers who are either outside of the company or using other UC systems, servers, or IM services. Without presence federation, a user can only see the presence information of other users who are on the same system and/or within their company. This is great for internal communications, but if you want to interact with people outside of your organization, especially with customers, partners, and suppliers, then federation is needed. With federation, rather than having separate islands of proprietary and private presence and IM systems, users on different environments can share presence information and IM with each other regardless of the system or service they’re using.

An alternate to federation, of course, is to ask all of your contacts to enroll in the same publicly-available presence service as you are using. The IM services of AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo! and others are examples of this. Similar examples exist within the social networking services such as Facebook. However, it is not hard to realize the limitations of that approach and the effort required to manage many IM interfaces. In addition, these public services are often not sufficient for enterprise needs, such as security and compliance requirements.

There are many ways that federation will have to work: Between servers in different companies; between servers within the same company; within a network of servers; between enterprise servers and public IM services (e.g., MSN, AOL, Yahoo!); and between servers and other systems that are a source or user of presence data. SIP/SIMPLE standards are one way that presence clients and devices to share presence information with a presence server.

There are two ways of looking at federation or federated presence - 1) sharing presence information with users on the same vendor’s platform but in different companies, and 2) sharing presence information with people on different vendors’ platforms.

In the first case, the single vendor can often provide the federation, but may use some proprietary methods to do so, limiting the reach and participation in the federation approach. For example, using federation on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), Jim at Genesys can see the presence status of Eric at Microsoft, and they can do click-to-call/click-to-communicate, collaborate and share documents, etc.

In the second case, a person (or company) using one vendor’s presence server would be able to connect with and see the presence of a colleague or partner using a presence server from another vendor. This requires conformity with industry standards, specifically the SIP/SIMPLE standards. This might occur within the same company, say if one division is using Microsoft OCS while another division is using Jabber IM. And, of course, it could occur between enterprises.

Of course, there is an alternative to just use a trusted network service so that each enterprise only need federate once with that service, rather than separately federating with each and every partner or customer. This has been used for years in telephony, e-mail and encryption services, so why not in IM and presence? We will have to watch and wait for this.

Think about email - it doesn’t matter what email system you’re using, you can send and receive email from anyone regardless of what email system they’re using. Enterprise-class IM and presence don’t yet work the same way - today, there is little or no federation between different enterprise IM and presence systems, although some of these systems offer federation with a few public IM systems, such as AIM and Yahoo.

For UC to be used successfully outside of the enterprise walls to customers, partners, suppliers, and others, federation is required across different types of IM services, and across different presence/IM servers and systems from different vendors (whether Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, etc.). For presence to be effective, it needs to work in a multivendor environment, especially when being used across company boundaries. This can happen either by system-to-system communications or by linkages to a central clearing house, and either way will require adoption of standards

The primary challenge making federation difficult to achieve is that different vendors have different ideas about what presence should be and how it should be used. Each supplier believes that it can “own” the presence engine, making interoperability more difficult. In addition, licensing for IM and presence systems may limit federation.

Many UC vendors are working on federation capabilities and standards. For example, both Microsoft OCS and IBM Sametime offer some federation capabilities - Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 supports federation between organizations using OCS 2007, with partner presence systems, and with public IM systems (AOL, Yahoo and Windows Live). In addition, a specification has been published to allow any presence server to federate with Office Communications Server. IBM Lotus Sametime federates with any SIP & XMPP user, as well as with Public IM networks such as AIM, Yahoo!, and GoogleTalk. While this is a start, much more work is needed in the area of federation, and to make it easier to share IM and presence information between systems and services from different vendors.

Tags: UC Information by Blair Pleasant
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It’s that wonderful time of the year when people around the world make their New Year’s resolutions – things they’ll do differently, bad habits they’ll quit, good habits they’ll start, and so on. Here are some New Year’s resolutions related to unified communications that I would like to see in the coming year.

Vendors working together toward federation: One of the biggest obstacles to UC success is the lack of federation, or the ability for one vendors’ UC/IM/presence offering to work with another’s. While we’ve seen some good success stories of UC helping companies internally, the number of situations where companies can use UC to interact with customers, partners, and suppliers using different platforms and different vendors’ products is limited. If I’m on a Cisco UC system, I can’t see the telephony presence of my customer on an Avaya UC system, for example. Federation is number one on my wish list.

Vendors, analysts, and consultants agreeing on a definition of unified communications: We’ve all been harping on this for a while, but there are still multiple definitions not only of UC, but also of Communication Enabled Business Processes, which is confusing to enterprise customers.

Analysts and vendors agreeing on a way to measure the UC market: As an industry analyst one of my jobs is to analyze and forecast the UC market. I’ve been an analyst for many years, analyzing several different markets – the unified communications market is by far the most difficult market I’ve had to measure. There is no agreement within the vendor community as to what constitutes the UC market, and they have not been forthcoming in providing market data that could be used in a market analysis (most likely because we’re still in the early stages of the market and the shipments have been limited).

Vendors and resellers providing sales and shipment data for their UC solutions: While PBX market analysts can easily count the number of PBX lines that have been shipped, or in the email market we can count the number of email licenses sold, there is no single element to count in the UC market. I resolve to develop a way to measure the UC market, but I need future buy-in from vendors and resellers who will need to provide the necessary market data.

Resellers being more receptive to selling UC solutions, rather than “boxes”: I know it’s a hard transition for many resellers who have been successful selling telephony or convergence products, but the time has come to embrace UC, which means a new sales approach. This approach may involve taking a vertical focus or a longer-term solution focus, but it is necessary. Some resellers are making the transition more easily than others, but vendors will be changing the way they compensate partners, so these partners will have to accept this and get on board.

My personal resolution: I resolve to be more open to other people’s definitions of UC and CEBP – this is an evolving market, and it is too early to say what it will look like in a few years. Even though I have firm ideas about what makes a UC solution, there are others with different beliefs, and many of these should be taken into account. I resolve to listen to these other ideas and integrate them into my own when appropriate.

If we as an industry can make and keep these resolutions, it will go a long way to helping the Unified Communications market grow.

Tags: UC Information by Blair Pleasant
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