Presence Management
Datapoint is committed to providing best of breed solutions for presence management as they come to market. Currently this is confined to a single solution which in our view provides the necessary foundation for multi vendor federated presence management. Others will be included as they mature and achieve this mandatory capability.
Presence is a foundation stone of unified communications. It provides visual indication of user status in a few basic states--on-line, off-line, away or busy. More robust or "rich presence" can aggregate and provide information about availability, location, skills, roles and other attributes.
From these sets of information, users and/or business process software can determine whether and how best to contact individuals or members of skill groups, to find the "right" resource in the most efficient way. Presence servers aggregate and publish availability information, while incorporating constraints imposed by policies, preferences, privacy concerns and security issues.
The Need For Federated Presence Management To be of any practical use in typical organisational environments which are multi vendor, federation, the term for this exchanging of presence information, is essential. At the current stage of market evolution, the ability to seamlessly view users presence status across any device is not universal. The prevalent reality is that SIP enabled solutions such as phones and video conferencing are arriving with their own limited presence capability which is creating ‘islands of presence’. Therefore this is generating the need for an integrated or federated capability to tie them all together.
Federation standards have to be open, robust and fully bi-directional. While some standards initiatives are already underway (e.g., SIP/SIMPLE, XMPP), these cover only the basics. They have yet to be fully adopted and they rely on suppliers to agree to provide the underlying data.
However, Avaya has been first to provide a solution to the problem of fragmented presence by aggregating telephony, desktop and application presence information from multiple vendor products using multiple protocols to give a federated view of the availability of users in an enterprise. It can bridge the previously mentioned industry standard protocols such as SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP.
The server is designed to find the availability of people, not endpoint devices or clients. It brings together different instances of presence, bridging different standards to give a universal view. It supports existing presence and telephony platforms, and provides a centralised system for managing and enforcing presence policies. User Options
What this means in practice is that the presence status between people using different instant messaging clients can now be seen. Or the presence status of someone remains visible as they log in and out of communications devices such as moving from desktop to mobile phone when leaving the office.
The server automates presence and availability updates and at the same time, allows users or enterprises to apply rules and policies to govern presence information exchange. The solution provides a range of options that users can adopt to refine how they are contacted.
The server has a series of information collectors and publishers that it combines with rules that help users control how and when they should be contacted and also allows the system to predict who is the best person to solve a specific business problem.
This means someone can choose not be contacted or to have certain rules around who can contact them. This is built from a broader set of options that allows organisations to describe people in terms of their presence and information based on their skills, location, availability and calendar information. Key Uses For Presence Management
Major uses for presence management in the short term as organisations evolve to full unified communication capability are as follows:
Call centres that want to deal with the ‘on average’ 10% of calls they manage which require bringing in expertise to provide 1st time resolution. These can be quickly identified and linked to customers using standard desktop software like Microsoft Office Communicator, IBM Lotus Sametime or Jabber XCP
In the medium term, the solution provides a common set of services on which innovative, presence-aware applications can be developed, supporting unified communications, customer service and communications-enabled business processes. For Avaya UsersFor customer who are building their communications infrastructure around the Avaya portfolio, Intelligent Presence is included within the Unified Communications Standard Edition and supported with Avaya one-X™ clients and endpoints, including one-X Portal, one-X Communicator and one-X Deskphones.
Soft clients will provide a single interface from which to view accurate, reliable presence status and select the most effective, efficient communication channel, including click to call or click to conference, with or without video. Avaya Intelligent Presence will integrate with Microsoft Office Communicator, IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Exchange during 2008/9.
For the technically minded, The Avaya Intelligent Presence Server is based on the highly scalable, multi-protocol Jabber Extensible Communications Platform™ (Jabber XCP™).
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