Your presence is requested

You're in a conference room in New York and you need to get in touch with Bob in Los Angeles. You don't know if Bob is in his office, on the road or in a meeting, so you don't know the best way to reach him.

But what if you could launch your Windows Messenger instant message application, click on Bob's name in your buddy list and immediately discover Bob's "presence." He happens to be in his office and can be reached over instant message or phone.

You decide to call Bob, so you click the voice-call option on your screen and start a conversation via softphone. As you're talking, Bob suggests that you add Sue to the call, so you check for her presence and see that she's available over voice and videoconference.

With a few more mouse clicks, you create a three-way conversation; you and Sue sharing a videoconference, with Bob hooked in over his voice link.

Of course, presence-based, real-time, multimedia communication like this hasn't arrived at the enterprise yet, but it's not that far off either.

One key driver is that Microsoft has bundled its Messenger client into Windows XP. And the latest version of Messenger supports Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard for interactive communication sessions between users.

That means as XP is rolled out across enterprise desktops, end users will have a built-in, standards-based client capable of talking to other SIP-based devices, be they phones, gateways, servers or PBXs.

But simply having Windows Messenger clients is only half the equation. That will give you basic, point to point, voice or video communication between two people on an enterprise network.

If you want the full breadth of features, such as multiparty conferencing, clicking on a name in your buddy list to place a call, dragging and dropping names from an Outlook folder to an icon on your desktop and starting a telephone call, then an application server or a SIP-savvy IP PBX is needed.

If you can wait, Microsoft recently announced that it will be moving instant messaging features from its Exchange e-mail server to a new server, code-named Greenwich, which will be part of the .Net server family. Estimated ship date is June 2003.

In addition vendors with very different backgrounds are offering or have announced products that piggyback on the Messenger client, with more expected to jump on the bandwagon in the next year.

• From the voice side, eDial, a Waltham, Mass., company that specializes in audioconferencing, is shipping an appliance that converts SIP to other common IP protocols as well as legacy telephony protocols, and provides interfaces to existing services.

With an eDial Communication Server, users can do online directory dialing from Outlook using the Windows Messenger SIP stack, click on a link in a Web customer support page to speak with a person, and create an instant, multiparty, multiprotocol audioconference.

• Israeli videoconferencing vendor VCON has added a SIP proxy to its MXM 3.0 application server and gatekeeper for H.323 rich media conferencing.