Flexible working - where 'presence' is everything

Imagine having just one contact address that follows you around and which emails, phone calls and IM can be sent to, no matter where you are or when you are available. Anthony Plewes explains this vision is being realised through presence technology and it will have a profound impact on the efficacy of flexible working.

The concept of presence will be familiar to all users of instant messaging. IM clients allow users to declare their availability to colleagues and friends. This means they are able to immediately contact the person if available. If a user is away from their desk for some time, the system will report that there has been no activity to stop any false positives.

IM is no longer a niche application. The number of IM users is growing at a spectacular rate. More than a million messages a day travelled across AOL’s network at the end of the first half of 2003. The Yankee Group estimates that this is a 25 per increase in six months. Enterprise IM growth is even more impressive, doubling on the AOL network alone during this time. Traditional corporate IM networks are faring just as well. IBM Lotus’s Sametime product added a million more corporate users between December 2002 and June 2003, making its total corporate messaging user base more than 9 million.

The nascent form of presence is already proving to be a very useful tool in the flexible worker’s armoury. “IM gives you a virtual office,” says Steve Gandy, co-founder of conferencing company MeetingZone. The company has 14 employees with only eight based in the company headquarters in Oxford. Gandy says that it allows them to keep in constant touch with the salesforce wherever they are around the country. “Instant messaging started out as a nice-to-have but it is now something that we would miss.”

Field workers who have been excluded from office-based collaboration can now take part in the process. Office workers that move across sites will be able to be reached irrespective of their location. Teams that work across different locations will be able to communicate as if they were in the same room. And freelancers will be able to keep in constant contact with their clients.

Presence will even be of benefit for those sceptical managers who suspect homeworkers of spending their time doing the washing up and watching television as it can offer visual proof that they are working at their desk.

The presence capabilities of IM are only scratching the surface of what could be possible. Further benefits will come from integrating presence with all forms of communication. Developments in IP telephony through session initiation protocol (SIP) will bring presence to voice communications. PBX manufacturers are already starting to use SIP as the communications protocol for IP telephony.

“Flexible working is a key application for IP telephony,” says Paul Rowe, Succession IP Telephony Solutions marketing manager, Nortel. “SIP is very powerful for mobile workers because all communications media can be integrated in one session.”

This means that once a call is set up any type of media can be added to the same session without having to make another call. For example, an instant messaging session could spawn a voice call and then a video conference all within the same environment.

However, companies do not need to wait until they are using fully-fledged SIP-based IP telephony to use presence in voice communications. Applications are already available that allow flexible workers to apply presence information to forms of communication other than IM.

Siemens Communications, for example, in October launched its Openscape application that runs on Microsoft’s Office Real-Time Communications Server. “We are bringing together the world of telephony and IM,” says Rob House, head of collaboration and integrity solutions at Siemens Communications.

Siemens has been using Openscape internally already and claims that it saves the average user 30 minutes per day. “It saves having to play voice mail tag and users can focus on tasks using presence,” says Tim Bishop, head of strategic marketing at Siemens Communications.

Market analyst Forrester sees three phases in the development of presence. The first is the communications era when presence moves beyond IM and permeates fixed and mobile networks. Second is presence moving into business applications and processes. The final stage is when presence is extended to products, services and transactions.

Building presence into line-of-business applications is essential for flexible workers as it will allow them to be integrated into company processes. For example, if a worker needs to contact a colleague to query an invoice, they can check the associated user, see if they are available and contact them immediately. This is already starting to happen in the IM world and it will be soon brought to all forms of communication.

But presence can even be pushed out beyond an enterprise’s boundaries. To exploit presence fully companies will be able interface with carriers and use the information they have on users to build up an even richer picture.

“Wireless carriers already have a lot of useful information,” explains Dynamicsoft CTO Jonathan Rosenberg. This includes whether the mobile phone is on, off or engaged, location and the quality of coverage. “As both enterprises and carriers build up presence data, carriers will offer it to enterprises. This will happen when carriers start deploying presence.”

Rosenberg says he expects there to be a big push towards building presence-based applications in 2004. Dynamicsoft calls this ‘subscriber-aware’ networks. “We have visibility of the plans of a number of carriers in the US and Europe.” he says. Early applications will include push-to-talk, an IM-like voice application that is proving to be popular in the US, and presence-enabled directories.

The presence information from carriers can be easily combined with enterprise applications through standard interfaces. It is not even necessary for the enterprise applications to describe presence in the same terms - all they need is a standardised interface, such as SIMPLE, to be able to peer to the wireless carriers. "Enterprises do not need to commit to a specific protocol internally,” says Rosenberg.

Combining enterprise and carrier presence information is the key to providing workers with richer information. This can include sources as diverse as geographic, calendaring and manually-entered information. And the more information is integrated, the more accurate the presence profile. For example, if a person’s diary says that they are in a meeting at a particular location, the geographic information from a mobile phone could confirm this, irrespective of whether the user has manually set their presence information to indicate they are in a meeting.