Presence simmers on back burner

Real-time collaboration using presence-based tools is still a few years away for most companies.

By themselves, today's collaboration technologies, such as instant messaging and audio, video and Web conferencing, help make workers more productive. But when combined with presence - information about where users are, what applications or devices they're using and how to best reach them - those collaboration tools can become part of a virtual workplace in which employees can quickly get information they need and ad hoc groups can set up meetings on the fly.

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By themselves, today's collaboration technologies, such as instant messaging and audio, video and Web conferencing, help make workers more productive. But when combined with presence - information about where users are, what applications or devices they're using and how to best reach them - those collaboration tools can become part of a virtual workplace in which employees can quickly get information they need and ad hoc groups can set up meetings on the fly.

The result: Companies save money, boost productivity and stay agile in a changing world.

It's a great goal, but it's still at least three to five years away for most organizations. That's one key finding in a recent Nemertes Research survey. Only 16% of the 43 IT executives who responded said they use presence now, another 26% plan to do so in the next six to 24 months, but that leaves 42% with no presence plans at all.

There are two main reasons why companies are holding back. Many IT executives don't see the justification, in resource terms, for deploying presence; and those that do still are focused on other real-time communications deployments, such as IM and Web conferencing.

That is expected to change over time, but until companies get a handle on IM, conferencing and basic security issues, presence will remain on the back burner for most IT executives.

Office politics

In the meantime, a war is brewing as vendors come at presence from a variety of angles. Applications vendors such as Microsoft and IBM Lotus view voice as an add-on to their collaboration products, while IP telephony vendors such as Nortel and Siemens see collaboration applications as an add-on to their voice systems.

Microsoft's Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005 is designed to work with public IM services from AOL and Yahoo, and Microsoft's own MSN Messenger. LCS 2005 also enables the integration of IM and presence awareness in other Microsoft applications, notably Office.

An MSN Messenger user will be able to IM an AOL user from within the LCS client using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP ). However, a user won't be able to IM that AOL user from within an Office application, at least not yet.

Although many survey respondents purchased licenses to LCS and the IM client (often as part of a larger enterprise license agreement), most have yet to deploy it.

Those who have installed LCS still are figuring out the right strategy for the future. "We use LCS for now, we have presence in our Office applications," says Alvin Lim, general manager of the Regional Microsoft practice at Asia Datacraft. "It's not yet embedded in back-end systems. It's a great technology, but we're trying to figure out the apps that apply."

Nevertheless, survey results show that Microsoft has the largest user base among participants: 20% of companies that have standardized on an enterprise IM system use Microsoft as their vendor, and 79% say they use or plan to use LCS for embedded presence.

IBM's newest entry in the real-time communications arena is Lotus Workplace Team Collaboration, which is Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition-based and offers integrated synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, which includes IM, presence awareness, Web conferencing, team spaces and development tools for embedding presence in enterprise applications.

Lotus is developing a SIP infrastructure for reuse across IBM software products. IBM also has defined an interdomain specification for SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions that enables interoperability among SIP-based IM offerings. But IBM today doesn't offer interoperability with other presence and IM vendors or services.

Just 11% of companies that participated in the survey use Lotus for IM, and only 7% who've embedded presence in other enterprise applications use Lotus to do so.

Presence at work

The value of audio, video and Web conferencing can increase when these services are presence-enabled and/or integrated with a company's IM system. Click-to-meet capabilities let users meet on the fly whenever and wherever they need to. Presence ensures all participants are, in fact, available for the meeting.

Some conferencing products let hosts schedule meetings to start as soon as participants are available, tapping into their online presence, their phone presence and their calendar presence. This can replace hours of coordination time and ensure meetings get done as soon as possible, which saves project time, as well.

"We love being able to jump from IM to audio or Web conferencing. We find that that's a very interesting phenomenon. Multi-party chats can escalate to voice conferencing, and they tend to do that. We're connected via the IP network, so there's no cost," Lim adds.

Convoq's ASAP is essentially a presence-enabled Web conferencing tool built on Macromedia's Flash technology. The eDial Instant Collaboration System provides enterprise-grade, secure IM, enhanced with presence, calling, and audio and Web conferencing from a user's standard Internet browser.

Meanwhile, many enterprise IM vendors are positioning themselves as presence vendors. Bantu, an enterprise IM product, integrates with WebEx Communications and Microsoft's Office Live Meeting, so users can launch a conference from within a Bantu instant message. They also can call someone simply by clicking on an audio link - and in both cases presence works to let users know the person or people they need to meet with are available.

All the major IM gateway vendors - Akonix, FaceTime and IMlogic - offer presence-integration tools that let IT executives build presence into the applications of their choice.