The future of presence

Matt Lambert | Blogs, Collaboration, Communityware, Instant Messaging, New Media, Presence, RSS, portal, voip | Saturday, December 23rd, 2006

A grand title, but I like the play on words.

I was very taken with the post on new presence from Alec Saunders, it does make you think.

The presence word seems to have been bandied about as the future of VOIP, and looking back, this has been for quite some time without massive developments. Most Enterprises I talk to haven’t yet even started to think IM.

Having looked at a lot of the responses, and considered a viewpoint, I have to say that MY presence isn’t yet important to me. I may be interested in someone elses, but I don’t really care that they’re present, just whether they have the time to communicate right now.

I can’t envisage me being IM’d as solving my information overload problem. Thus highlighting the big difference between seeing someone else being present, and making my own presence known. Where is the permission element?

I also can’t imagine circumstances where I would have enough time to manage the constantly changing context, relationship and profile information. Will users change their status….not me.

Simply, the most useful thing about an IM client when I see someone logged on, is that it ‘reminds’ me that I want to discuss something with them. I may or may not wish to enter into a real time discourse - often I’ll email them anyway, helping with my scheduling, which may sound like a cardinal sin to technocrats, but it’s only for a lack of sufficient information management tools…honest.

Perhaps what we really need is a conversation management tool - something that reminds us about things we have to do at an appropriate time! The inbox used to be enough as a ‘to do’ list….but no more. There are lots of point solutions, the IM box, the email inbox, the Enteprise portal, Blogs, Community Ware, RSS Readers and so forth.

My wife tells me I should be more organised - and I think being helped to plan things properly is just what is missing.

 

Forget VOIP, I’ll use my mobile (Cell Phone)

Matt Lambert | Call Handling, Mobility, Unified Communications, pbx, voip | Friday, December 8th, 2006

I don’t understand the attraction of VOIP for remote workers. I must be missing something but I’m not the only one.

Why would a company install VOIP for us remote type people?

  • Is it Cost?

Surely not. To my mind it is expensive to provide good quality voice over broadband between office and the remote worker. Costs include kit, set up, security and Quality of Service.

  • Is it convenience (of a single number for callers) ?

If I don’t have to change anything when I leave my desk to continue receiving calls, and callers don’t need to know a different number, surely that is as convenient as you can get?

  • Cost for callers?

Callers ring my office, and automatically get transferred to my mobile. No extra cost for them.

Potential problems, and how I get around them:

  • Too many people know my mobile number?

Nope, I publish the office number that transfers to my mobile (I can switch the diversion off). I also screen my calls with a personal assistant.

  • It costs money to transfer calls from the office to the mobile?

Nope, a GSM gateway and vodafone sametime contract means zero onward cost.

  • You don’t get unified communications?

Yes I do.

  • You have more than one voicemail?

No I don’t.

  • You lose functionality of a PBX?

I can still use conferencing and i have ’presence’ via my web based UC, and although I’m not part of a hunt group, without going into details, callers can still speak to someone else if they can’t get hold of me, without hanging up.

So, let me know if I’m missing something, knowing me it will be flipping obvious.

Matt

 

Email and the Information Overload (ers)

Matt Lambert | Collaboration, Instant Messaging, New Media, Unified Communications, email | Thursday, December 7th, 2006

There is something cynical that I just can’t get away from regards email, and it is this, ”When someone needs some information to complete a task, and they email YOU, who’s fault is it when the task doesn’t get done?” 

There should be a name for people who get this wrong. 

It is perhaps not a mystery as to how we got into information overload, as email is just the most user friendly, accessible and powerful of tools. But as this article shows, from Nick Fera, by referring to some excellent source material, we’re probably near being overwhelmed by our inbox.

Parlano is definitely onto something with their topic based communications platform. The conversation is what is central and consistent, and it uses an interface people already know how to use. Microsoft LCS. Unifying communications summed up. By seeing which conversations are updated at a glance, we users could prioritise properly again, heaven.

If you look at email in comparison, the conversation is all over the inbox, cluttered and obscure. I often said that I used email as my To Do list, but I just can’t see what I need to do any more.

Perhaps we just don’t know how to use email properly - but the answer to any knotty problem usually means we eventually find something that is more intuitive to use. Personally, I can’t wait.

Other people, like Mike Gotta have linked to this decision making tree around communicating, and its thought provoking as to what tool we should use for what purpose. I can’t help thinking we haven’t yet seen the other half of the toolbox yet though.

 

Incoming! Call Handling

Matt Lambert | Call Handling, Unified Communications, Voicemail, pbx | Thursday, December 7th, 2006

Along with email, incoming calls disrupt the working day as communications overload kicks in for many of us.

Michael Urlocker posted looking at some interesting services appearing to help filter out unwanted calls.

So there are clearly tools appearing for the hapless and overloaded to help manage their day, but it is still early days for the business user. - Obviously the consumer and business user are the same person, just at different times of day, and with different numbers to protect -

Voicemail has been here for a while, but that’s not much use as a filter.

Some calls are wanted ’sometimes’, the problem is complex, as relevance does change according to circumstance as Alec at Iotum understands.    

I don’t think that call filtering can be done purely on the basis of recognising an incoming number, this is only reliable if you have all incoming numbers in a very up to date meta directory dot dot dot.

There may be hope for that, but still better to have an additional ability to use a screening ’service’ for all your calls. It will undoubtedly become more prevalent, and acceptable, as this problem grows for more people.

I personally like the ability to have a system ask the caller their name before allowing me to choose whether now is the right time to accept the call, and this idea is already making progress.

For business people, this would commonly be achieved through central telephony technology rather than, separate ‘throwaway’ numbers for different circumstances.

For instance, if you decide not to take a call - the caller may wish to transfer to a colleague or another department instead of being forced to leave a voicemail. In business, we ought to think about callers in terms of delivering a service as well as our own precious time!

 

 

 

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