Is presence just another buzzword used to sell UC products, or is it an important factor in making the most of integrated communications applications? Let’s take a look at how it works and discuss how it can help users take advantage of new technology more effectively.
Presence: More than just being thereWhen used in the context of communication applications and devices, presence refers to the ability to ascertain the status of your contacts at a given time. In other words, you can tell at a glance whether someone you want to call is available and, in some cases, the reason for and extent of unavailability.
For example, common presence indicators include Online (available for communications), Busy (currently engaged in other communications or activities), Away (not at the desk or in the office, otherwise unavailable), and Do Not Disturb (in but not available). Some options are more specific, such as Be Right Back or Out to Lunch, giving others an idea of how long you’ll be unavailable. Your presence indicator may also tell others whether you have a Webcam for video calling/conferencing.
Presence status indicators first became popular with instant messaging clients. With most IM clients, you can set your status, including making yourself appear to be offline when you’re actually online. You may also be able to enter a custom status message, such as “Be back at 3 P.M.” or “Gone to doctor’s appointment.”
You may be able to configure the software to change your status automatically. For example, you can configure Windows Live Messenger to set your status to Away if you’re inactive for a specified period of time or to automatically show you as Busy if you’re running a full-screen program or presentation.
Beyond instant messagingThe presence concept has moved beyond IM and chat programs. Unified communications ties together different modes of communication such as IM, e-mail, and voice and video calls. With this type of integration, a user’s status can help determine how to handle calls and messages. For example, if you’ve set your status to Busy, calls might go directly to voice mail, whereas if your status is Out of Office, the system could redirect those office calls to your cell phone or home phone.
In a truly integrated system, you could assign priority ratings to your contacts or even to particular subject lines. Then, for example, if you received an e-mail message with a high priority but were away from the computer, the system could ring your cell phone and notify you of the message — or even read the message to you.
The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is becoming the standard for VoIP telephony. Extensions to SIP can use “presence agent” software to store information about users’ status to make it available for other users.
You can even subscribe to a particular user’s status information and receive automatic notification when that user’s status changes (e.g., when the user comes online, goes out to lunch, etc.). The user still has control over his or her own presence information and can distribute that information not just from a computer but also from a PDA or cell phone.
Presence and privacyThe ability of others to know when we are and aren’t available inevitably brings up privacy issues. We may want some people to have this information but don’t necessarily want everyone to be able to monitor when we’re online or offline.
To address this, software makers build features into their programs that allow you to decide how you want your presence status displayed. You can select certain people whom you want to block from viewing your status, or you can select only certain people who will be able to see your status and block everyone else from viewing it.
This actually gives us more privacy than we would have without presence. In the “old days” when there were no presence indicators, if we were expecting a call, we would have to remain available to everyone so as not to miss that call. That meant someone we didn’t want to communicate with could call. Now we can represent ourselves as unavailable to all but the person whose call we’re expecting.
Problems with presenceIf presence indicators don’t actually pose a threat to privacy and, if properly used, give us more of it, what problems present obstacles to the adoption of presence technology? Perhaps the biggest problem is that currently, the user has to manually set his or her status indication.
As we discussed, some programs may have limited ability to detect what you’re doing and change your status automatically, but in most cases you have to remember to change it yourself. So if you go off to lunch and leave your status set to Online, people will be trying in vain to reach you while you’re gone. And if you do remember to indicate that you’re away but then forget to change it when you get back, others will think you aren’t available when you are.
As systems become more automated, the usefulness of presence information will grow. For example, there’s already software available for Windows Mobile phones that will check your calendar and automatically turn your phone off or set it to vibrate during the time that you have blocked out to be in a meeting. After the scheduled end of the meeting, the software turns the phone’s ringer back on. You could also use this type of technology to change your presence indicator status based on your calendar information.
SummaryPresence information can help business users communicate more efficiently by making calls or sending messages at a time when they know the recipient is available to receive them and by notifying users when another user’s status changes so they don’t have to play telephone tag or guessing games to try to get in touch. As communication modes become more unified and various communications devices become more integrated, presence information can become available across different platforms and in a more automated way to make it more accurate, transparent, and convenient for users.
Although “presence” may seem like just another industry buzzword, it has the potential to change the way we communicate in significant ways. Look for more and more products to feature “presence” as an integral part of the package, and look for vendors to gather, distribute, and use presence information in increasingly sophisticated ways.
[ add comment ] ( 1 view ) | permalink |
( 3 / 109 )Experts say that telepresence is poised to emerge as a billion-dollar industry.
Market research firm Frost & Sullivan is predicting that the industry will grow by 850% worldwide over the next five years, from $145 million in 2007 to $1.4 billion in 2013.
Telepresence is a combination of very high quality audio and videoconferencing technology integrated with management services and especially designed physical environments to create a simulation of in-person meetings. In high-end installations, users can book a telepresence meeting in Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes. Then they can walk into a telepresence room at the appointed time, and the meeting will be up and running without any need to dial in or turn on cameras.
It is that tight integration of telepresence technology and services that has analysts optimistic about this newest form of video-based communication, according to Dominic Dodd, Frost & Sullivan's senior industry analyst and program manager for conferencing and collaboration in Europe. Dodd said the service elements of telepresence produce an "immersive experience" that creates an illusion of being in the same room with someone hundreds or thousands of miles away.
[ add comment ] ( 1 view ) | permalink |
( 3 / 113 )Zeus Kerravala
Despite the innovation in VoIP and unified communication (UC) platforms, the IP phone itself hasn't kept up with the rest of the VoIP ecosystem. Expect 2008 to be the year the IP phone undergoes a facelift as vendors create more functionality in the phone, allowing users to create a more custom experience.
When companies have deployed VoIP, I've asked many of the users what types of things they do with the phone now that they did not do before. Most of the time, the answer is they do nothing differently. Users make calls, they hang up and then they make another call. Exciting stuff! The reason is that the majority of IP phones available today don't provide the users much more functionality than those of the past. They may have full-color screens and better sound, but they don't add that much more functionality to the end user.
Contrast that with the innovation in mobile phones with touch-screens, full keyboards, MP3 players, Web browsers and many other features, and it's clear that innovation with consumer mobile phones has far outpaced that of corporate telephony. This is one of the main reasons workers are relying more on their mobile phones and less on their desktop phones. For example, when I miss a call on my mobile phone, I can normally return it with a few clicks. When I miss a call on a corporate IP phone, there's a missed call log, but it's buried a few menus down and much more complicated than it should be. I can give you plenty of other examples where the functionality of my mobile device is just better than that of my desk phone, but the net result is that I have my desk phone forwarded to my mobile phone most of the time. The innovation with mobile phones has also allowed me to easily create a totally customized user experience. I know it's possible to do some customization with high-end IP phones, but it's normally pretty complicated.
I expect this to change over the next 12 to 24 months as VoIP manufacturers look to appeal to more tech-savvy users with a broader range of phones that are most customizable. There are already a few examples of this on the market today. Avaya's One-X phone, which looks and acts very much like a consumer device, allows users to load their own MP3s for personal ringtones and has a USB jack on the back and a very friendly user interface. Mitel's Navigator "phone" is designed to integrate into desktop environments.
So what does this mean to you, the buyer? Understand that the phone will be a key point of innovation over the next couple of years, and expect more from your vendors. Press your vendor of choice into showing you a long-term roadmap of where its IP phones are headed, and get aggressive with the trade-up value of older phones.
Larger, more colorful screens are nice, but your end users will want to create a customized experience like the other pieces of technology in their personal and professional lives.
Zeus Kerravala manages Yankee Group's infrastructure research and consulting. His areas of expertise involve working with customers to solve their business issues through the deployment of infrastructure technology solutions, including switching, routing, network management, voice solutions and VPNs.
[ add comment ] ( 1 view ) | permalink |
( 2.9 / 114 )Gurmeet S. Lamba
12.09.2007
To quote a popular Virginia Slims ad from the 1960s, VoIP has definitely "come a long way, baby" from its roots in the late 1990s to its role today as a business-critical component within the unified communications (UC) market.
Some technology pundits have questioned VoIP, however -- in terms of bandwidth, latency, security and, especially, reliability, among other factors. Cisco and Avaya have led the field of companies embracing VoIP and the concept of enterprise IP telephony.
The question becomes one of how an enterprise organization can deflect the pundits and truly gain confidence in an IP telephony environment, making it "future ready" to scale with changing market dynamics. The answer lies in integrated management and testing solutions that not only validate IP telephony devices on a one-off basis but continuously monitor on a large scale to maximize performance and ongoing operations.
In a distributed environment, integrated management and testing offers smoother end-user operation, integrity and functionality across all phases of an IP phone system from conception to deployment to optimization. The key to a successful IP telephony deployment lies in diagnosing the problems and vulnerabilities of the system, since this can be a complex and in-depth process. The management solution needs to automatically discover all components in the network related to IP telephony – this is similar to the Google model of crawling the Web, but applied to maintaining server and application health.
As a guide to gaining a future-ready IP telephony environment, the foundation is based on four pillars: 1) automated testing capabilities, 2) troubleshooting and diagnostics, 3) in-depth reporting and business intelligence (BI), and 4) continuous monitoring.
Automated testing equals better end-to-end IP telephony management. For automated testing to work, the solution must emulate the end user. Typically, an end user will pick up a phone, place a call, conduct conference calls, check voicemail and so on. Automated testing takes the typical calling experience one step further by emulating the entire environment under load, while simultaneously validating full feature availability to end users. It is important to remember that automated testing does not replace product quality assurance (QA) but serves instead as a complement by testing all components of the deployment. A comprehensive automated testing solution offers sophisticated resource selection using algorithms which ensure that all the features and capability of the IP telephony system are in full working order. It is rare for the IP hardware to break down, but issues tend to arise at the handset during deployment, configuration and administration of servers, applications, network components and so on.
The second pillar addresses the importance of troubleshooting and diagnostics. In addition to testing, the future-ready IP telephony environment should offer support staff a set of help-desk applications for enhanced productivity that improves user acceptance. Within larger enterprises, Tier-1/2 support staff may excel in their comfort zones related to typical computer or network issues but may be limited in their knowledge of voice deployment problems. Outside of a select few, there is a lack of tools for these staffers to effectively handle IP telephony-related issues without escalating it to seasoned voice professionals. The capability to offer a portal for tier-1/2 engineers with a consolidated view of a trouble phone and then remote control the phone across the globe via one central help-desk center can transform IT efficiency and drive up end-user satisfaction.
In-depth reporting and business intelligence constitute the third pillar. Dashboards are the rage these days and that applies to IP telephony. One snapshot can equal a thousand words by offering insight into detailed inventory reports. In the corporate world, senior management sometimes overlooks the fact that IT departments are business assets that help keep the company technically sound and running at optimal productivity. IT must be viewed as a strategic weapon in the corporate arsenal and not portrayed as a cost center. An efficient IP telephony management system provides deep reporting, analytics related to productivity, change management, asset management, performance and compliance, helping IT organizations provide significant business value for the enterprise.
Pillar number four is perhaps the most important of all – voice monitoring. Even if an organization refuses to commit to the first three pillars, this one is by far the most important to focus on in your IP telephony strategy. Besides continuous monitoring of end-user voice quality, a solution must monitor security and compliance issues and track fraudulent use of the system (inappropriate calls to 900 numbers, international long distance, toll fraud, etc.). In addition, it must monitor service availability, especially if a gateway is down, calls are blocked and IT needs to be alerted. In a highly classified environment, voice monitoring is crucial for catching any unencrypted calls and receiving notifications that a gateway is at, or out of, capacity.
In order that the four pillars should help an organization create a highly reliable and scalable future-ready IP telephony environment, each one must strategically address end user behavior, integrity and functionality. The future-ready IP telephony management system must also be applications focused to address the many complexities of unified communications applications, an evolving data network environment, frequent software updates and so on. Also, it must feature a solution that can scale with the enterprise and integrate into the IT infrastructure: enterprise directories, role-based authentication, open APIs to integrate with dashboards, email systems and SNMP for notification. Most importantly, it is critical to have it integrated with the enterprise network management system – regardless of the platform. In short, it must be designed from the ground up for IP telephony and UC – not simply as an extension of a hardware or packet sniffing-based solution.
Telephony is business-critical to a myriad of enterprises, large and medium sized, with unique characteristics that differentiate it from other applications on the data network. IT organizations that incorporate these four pillars into their management solutions will deliver superior confidence and will be well on their way to creating a future-ready IP telephony environment.
Gurmeet S. Lamba is VP, Engineering for Clarus Systems. He can be reached via email at glamba@clarussystems.com. For more information, visit www.clarussystems.com.
[ 1 comment ] ( 5 views ) | permalink |
( 2.9 / 178 )Voice over IP (VoIP) can potentially give your clients more features than traditional, TDM-based phone systems, and experts predict it's just a matter of time before VoIP entirely replaces traditional phone lines. If you're a systems integrator (SI) looking to expand into voice, providing VoIP services could be a great way to add to your portfolio and generate new leads with existing clients.
Since VoIP sits on a standard local area network (LAN) -- and in many cases will use your client's existing LAN -- several SIs say it's a natural step for companies who already build and maintain network infrastructures. If your client has requested a network assessment, take a look at their TDM-based phone system and see if it's time to start planning a migration to VoIP.
The cross-selling works the other direction too. Because VoIP requires a robust LAN, many vendors require you to assess and often upgrade your client's network as the first step to providing VoIP services.
"As everybody in our business knows, an assessment not only provides a great service to a client, but it's also a paid sales call," said Eric Nelson, director of Alteritech Inc., an SI and managed service provider (MSP) in Vienna, Va. "If you find things that are wrong -- well, now you get to fix them," he said.
Although VoIP is profitable in itself, the ability to deepen your relationship with a client is itself a big revenue generator, said Alan Bratton, president and CEO of Paranet Solutions LLC, a systems integrator (SI) in Plano, Texas.
The ability to tie various communications media together -- known as unified communications (UC) -- also provides a good cross-selling possibility, said Henry Dewing, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. A good place to start is by providing video capabilities so end users can videoconference from their desks, he said. UC can also connect with email and fax, allowing users to see all of their messages from Outlook.
VoIP resources for systems integrators and VARs
Learn more about offering VoIP services in our Hot Spot Tutorial.
Providing VoIP services does require extra knowledge about the systems, of course, and you may have to shore up your support staff. People are used to "five nines" -- 99.999% -- of uptime with phones, and while they may tolerate email occasionally going down for half an hour, phones always have to be up.
Many VoIP systems provide the ability to failover to a traditional, TDM-based system for emergencies, but you may still have to work on your support staff's culture to instill a sense of urgency in them.
"Data guys typically have this 'sometime soon' attitude," Nelson said. But with VoIP, "you better be jumping all over that, because that's someone's voice system; that's money out the door," he said.
If you don't have the resources to invest in providing VoIP services yourself, you may want to partner with a hosted "Voice as a Service" vendor. Installing a hosted VoIP system is much easier than putting all of the infrastructure on premise; typically the vendor supplies a router that all of the phones connect to and which then talks directly with the vendor, Nelson said.
That model works well for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that can't afford an on-premise solution, he said. It also fits the MSP business model, since you can remotely monitor the system. Nelson said most channel members don't actually build out their own hosting centers, since those are expensive and require a skill set many MSPs don't have.
Alteritech deploys both on-premise and hosted VoIP for its customers, but you can also work exclusively on the hosted model. New York-based SI Lloyd Group offers VoIP through M5 Networks Inc., a hosted VoIP vendor.
"As a small business, there's only so many things you can tackle. Technology is constantly changing, it's constantly evolving," Brian David, Lloyd Group's vice president of business development, said. Lloyd Group decided to focus on its core competency as an IT consulting firm and have M5 handle the specifics of providing VoIP services, David said.
M5 takes care of most of the network analysis to see how the infrastructure needs to be upgraded. Lloyd Group then fixes up the network and installs the router that connects with M5's backend.
But although the hosted model can fit an SMB's needs, it doesn't scale well enough for larger companies. Aside from just the response time of your support staff, on-premise VoIP puts unique demands on your client's network infrastructure. In our next installment, we'll take a look at some of the challenges you may face in deploying a VoIP system and how to address them.
[ add comment ] ( 1 view ) | permalink |
( 3 / 185 )Next
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Calendar
