The same Interop session on Presence that featured UL's Christian Anschuetz also had a group of vendor executives on the panel, and they offered a range of ideas about where we're at with presence capabilities, and where we need to be.Jack Jachner of Alcatel-Lucent offered the big picture, that presence is something you'll have to run as a service that end users subscribe to in different applications. That's the way it is now, but the ability to subscribe to it is generally limited to your enterprise IM portal and, in the case of Microsoft, your Office applications like Outlook and Word.
In the future, being able to subscribe to someone's presence in a particular application--and maybe only in that application--may help tailor presence into something usable, so that you're not bombarded with presence statuses for tons of people that you don't have much to do with most of the time, nor do you have to scroll down an interminable Buddy List to find the person you need.
So the presence systems will need to integrate with various internal systems, from directories to social networking/Share Point-type services, as well as policy servers. That last item consumed a lot of the conversation among the vendor representatives and the audience.
One audience member expressed the concern when he mentioned the wild world of Twitter, Facebook, etc. today--te the way that you're exposed more or less indiscriminately to information about people that you don't want or need, and face the potential for doing the same yourself in your own use of these social networking tools.
"Presence defeats privacy," this audience member concluded.
So policy engines need to deal with these sort of connections to third-party systems--whether it's public social networking sites or networks of partner organizations that are external to the enterprise itself, our panel concluded. Plus policy servers also need to be able to manage all the aspects of compliance, like records retention for discovery and regulatory compliance.
And just getting diverse presence systems to talk to each other--i.e., federate--was an issue we barely even got time to discuss, which I'm guessing was kind of a relief to my vendor panelists. Yes, the standards are all there, and yes, they all (Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya) asserted, should be able to exchange basic presence information.
But we're a ways off from the kind of "rich presence" capabilities that dominated our discussion.
