How Present Does Presence Need to Be?
Here's an interesting issue that came up in a podcast interview I did this morning with Paul Lopez, who's GM, Marketing at NEC Unified Solutions. NEC recently made its Univerge 360 announcement around Unified Communications, and in the course of a UC-focused conversation, Paul and I eventually got around to the topic of presence.
Opinions seem to vary about the importance of presence in UC. From an architectural standpoint, it pretty clearly has to sit at the core of the network, but does that mean its functionality is core to the success of a UC deployment?
The element of the discussion that Paul introduced in this morning's conversation was the efficacy of presence--in other words, if you have a global network with, say, 100,000 users on it, can presence really work the same way it does with your Yahoo buddy list of a dozen or so names?
The technical concerns, Paul suggested, are network latency (in the case of global networks, at least), and just the ability of your existing Active Directory or other directory services infrastructure to handle the new, likely much increased, workload.
I'd be surprised if anyone could give you, today, an answer to this question that you could take to the bank. The kind of full-scale presence that UC contemplates must represent a whole new level of demand on the directory services as well as the underlying network, in terms of capacity and performance.
The good news, Paul said, may be that you can offer some streamlined presence capabilities for global implementations--do you really need to know the exact status of a colleague's communications channels, or is some less granular function sufficient?
I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts, especially on the technical issues Paul raises.
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