Conversationware

When I looked for free web based email, I knew Gmail was going to be the best option.

With huge amounts of storage, accessible from my various PC’s, Spam filters and desktop notifications (so I don’t have to check for new mail, which is the most important), plus Gtalk Instant Messaging on the same login - so it proved.

Thus, when I wanted to have separate ‘blog’ email, I took a look at Google Apps (it’s free, so why not).

Google Apps is Gmail, but with your own domain - (e.g. mail is sent to name@company.com) but with all the above benefits, and more. Being free, I think it’s great value, and even at the premier edition at $50 per user per year - compared to the cost of running premises based equivalents is a no brainer.

Setting it up does mean you need your own domain, and access to the control panel to follow google’s instructions in moving the Email MX records…..it’s easier than it sounds though, and knowing someone who can help is useful.

On first impressions, it was good. But last year…..

I had the problem of trying to access two separate Gmail accounts from the same machine - it turned out to be very unwieldy flicking from account to account and notifications weren’t as timely if I wasn’t logged in.

It’s amazing how the little things prevent you from using and being completely happy with software.

Recently however, Google Apps and Gmail have both moved to supporting IMAP, and my problems have been solved. It’s brilliant!

One of the most useful additional applications is Docs - great for sharing information between boundaries….accessible from anywhere. I haven’t worked out my three different calendars yet, but there are apparently synching apps available.

I’m now using Thunderbird to receive and send mail from multiple gmail accounts (as well as a separate email account for work!). I can still be logged in to my primary gmail account (personal) for most of the day.

With all the above facilities, Google Apps is aimed at companies - but I always wondered whether companies would get over the trust issue. That is, trusting Google to look after their email.

I figured for my own part that if Google let any information go, their share price would slide, and therefore they had more to lose than I did.

There is an extremely interesting article here, showing a Legal company have made exactly the same decision.

Email server, Software, support, Spam software, archiving, the list of savings just goes on.

If you don’t need to support a LAN to run documents and email (with failover support), this tends to help free up both funds and the staff from looking after it, not to mention users who can literally work anywhere with mobile broadband.

It has to be worth most small companies time in having a look at this, and if Legal companies are happy to trust their customer’s information, then that shouldn’t stop anyone.

Something is wrong with Presence.

I harp on about this technology, and I keep looking around to see whether I can be proved wrong.

So, I was grateful to Mike Gotta (again) for pointing to this audio interview (48MB, 50 Min) with one of the founding fathers of Presence, Peter St-Andre with Lee Dryburgh, who happens to be organising a Unified Communications event in the spring, Ecomm2008

I do like being proved wrong, although friends and family may disagree, but my problem with Presence is still that it doesn’t seem scalable beyond immediate and close relationships.

Although very entertaining, and well worth the (your) time, I’m not sure the interview answered all my questions.

Ok, here’s the beef.

The more people I know, the more likely I am to be interrupted at someone elses convenience. 

On the basis that I don’t want to micro-manage my availability between constantly changing relationships with all the people I know, I just can’t make it work.

I initially equated Presence with ‘Busy Lamp Field’.

This was a quaint term used to describe the lights on a key telephone system handset, that lit when someone lifted their phone handset. As an early key system evangelist I thought this ‘Presence’ was going to be great.

Of course, the supposition turned out to be wrong. Despite people desperately wanting it to work (including me). Busy Lamp Fields are possibly why ‘phone’ people are very keen on this tech, but BLF and IM are not the same!

Whilst a ‘lit lamp’ told someone I was on the phone, and helped them know ‘not to try calling me’ (note, try) - when the lamp wasn’t lit, it DID NOT mean I was definitely at my desk and available to talk.

Whereas, the blinking IM message says that until you reply, you’re being ignorant. The refusal to communicate is in broad daylight.

Thus, there is an emotional blackmail being set, and to my mind that is exactly why people don’t buy into it.

It almost pains me to say it, but telephone presence is more useful to the recipient than desk based presence, in that there is no obligation to interact.

Another problem exists and it is this.

As a real time communication, there are also less facilities than asynchronous communication. This question of synchronous vs asynchronous came up in the podcast also, but indirectly.

So, the time to compose a considered and consultative response just isn’t there in real time conversation.

You can’t forward an IM for consideration by someone to contribute (with any certainty someone is going to be there right now!)

And, unlike other web based communication, the conversation isn’t discoverable (indexed) and won’t contribute to the knowledge base of the rest of the community. 

I find it interesting that the chap who first got me thinking on the Presence subject, Alec Saunders, has his company, Iotum, pioneering another communications medium - the multiparty conference call. 

Interesting because the conference call, whosoever has one, is booked in advance, and has a subject. It is a viable alternative to Presence . The permission factor is key for me. I’m not yet sure whether this has a significance on Alec’s thoughts on his New Presence…dot dot dot.

So, let’s have an invite…and acceptance….to talk about a subject….at a particular time, or joint circumstance.

If we have agreed to talk on a subject, and we’ve both concurrently indicated we’re in free mode, THEN let the availability be shown. It’s better than trying to reclassify everyone I know.

In my view, Presence missed a step, the equivalent of the ringing phone invitation.

We’ve had communications Vendors telling us for months that;

• Voip is Unified Communications
• Unified Messaging is Unified Communications
• Sending an SMS from a database event is Unified Communications

All very irritating for everyone (ok, that would be me), but probably even more so from an analyst point of view.

The good news that someone sensible from the analyst community got involved, and Melanie Turek, tells it like it is. Bravo

The CURRENT guestimated market size is very interesting indeed, less than $10M.

I’m sure that’s about right given the (correct) definition

However, Vendors have all promised their investors that there is gold at the end of this rainbow. The land of Unified Communications will deliver prosperous and wonderous times.

So, how long will it take to get there?

VOIP (red) vs ‘Unified Communications’ Search trends (blue)

Having figuratively left Reading Town a few months ago, my guess is that we’re only up the road in Newbury, the natives look pretty similar, and the emperors new clothes are still only just getting worn in.

There is a broader point

Until we define things properly and without fluff and nonsense, then the interest in unified communications won’t hit the heights that vendors want to see.

(More diagrams after the jump for RSS readers)

(more…)

According to Michael Arrington at Techcrunch, Google is to acquire GrandCentral shortly. Thanks for the point Alec, are you next ? Google acquisitions are at a frantic pace right now.

This is remarkably quick work, as I only asked them for Unified Communications in my post on Saturday.

I believe this is a great move for Google, and I’m sure they’ll be pleased I think so. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure this puts them closer to Unified Communications than most any other provider.

Google have email, voice mail..sort of, instant messaging and video conferencing and now they ‘have’ telephony - the inbound flavour at any rate.

This may be considered a consumer move, but actually, not having to integrate with a company’s existing infrastructure to deliver functionality, and get users, is a key point. Integration is one of the harder aspects of on premises Unified Communications platform integration. It certainly confuses customers at any rate - the first question is usually “is it voip or not?”, and the answer is usually, “well, it could be”. Not a great start.

Inbound call handling is one of those items that is difficult to solve with on premise equipment because callers can choose to ring through different networks (mobile or landline) before the call even gets to the PBX, and if somehow manage to persuade callers to route all inbound calls through the company’s PBX first, there are extra call charges to consider when diverting off net, plus you don’t easily get telephony status, or ‘presence’ from the switch for trunk to trunk calls to mobiles - this is achievable, but in some (not all) cases can be extremely expensive.

Google (Grand Central) don’t need to bother with all that, and will appeal to individual consumers, but don’t forget that all consumers usually work for someone too! If this news is true, people could use Google Inbound services immediately without involving internal IT, by overlaying the service onto existing numbers.

It reminds me a little of when Rim and Blackberry started with marketing mobile email to high value individuals, and then steamrollered into the Comms room later on, once hearts and minds had been won.

One of my first posts on this blog was that Hosted Unified Communications was unlikely (ok, I said no chance), mainly because companies were unlikely to trust hosting companies. BUT, I hadn’t taken into account the Google factor. Google has so much invested in being trustworthy with companies’ and individual’s data already, that one might trust them - despite all of the rumblings from those technically savvy commentators.

Another post was about Google disrupting corporate email, because the reduction in costs could be colossal if only corporations would trust a hosting company with their email. The potential reduction in costs is massively increased if replacing Unified Communications as well.

The way I look at it, the term ‘Mobile Presence’ seems to be a contradiciton in terms. 

I originally read this linked article and found myself thinking the issue was very complicated. And now, having mulled it over in terms of whether this technology was something I would actually ‘use’ or not, I’m skeptical.

Leaving aside the ability to see if someone is on the phone or not….till another time at any rate…

My first thought was;

Because I always have my mobile with me does that mean I’m now always present?

Trouble is - I don’t want to instant message via a mobile phone if I can help it - as I’m usually busy being mobile and away from my desk.

Looking back, ‘Presence’ was coined by the Instant Messaging PC client, and therefore, to say I am ‘present’ actually means that I am at my PC desktop and contactable. Not being present means I have wandered off and am not going to respond.

In my book, this concept can’t be extended to a mobile phone, so ‘mobile presence’ is a misnomer. OK, enough with the re-iteration already already.

The meaning of Presence, has started to morph into ‘availability and willingness to interact’, and to that end a lot of discussion is being put into handling contacts, grouping them, and puttings rules against VIP versus double glazing people. And the bottom line is, I’m not sure about this.

So, in the instance I am away from my desk, I would pitch my voicemail against ‘presence’ technology as being most useful. Give me a call, and I’ll decide on the spot whether I’ll answer you or not, and, unlike a rules engine, I won’t ever get it wrong.

So, if I really can’t talk to you now, then leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as it is convenient. Of course, leaving a voicemail should in itself move the conversation onwards, so this isn’t a waste of either your or mine time.

I think that’s a lot easier than maintaining a presence engine via some small mobile screen that you forget to check every ten minutes, don’t you?

So couldn’t the communications industry just define Presence to mean Whether I’m at my desktop, or not?

It’s not perfect, so perhaps we should think more about how conversations are initiated, a more formal process that simulates that so repetitive IM, “can we talk?” 

That permission element is going to be all important

A useful article here, which has gartner predicting that enterprise IM will go from 25 to 100% penetration in enterprises by the end of the decade, and it has some market figures.

There are some other predictions, like “by 2012, presence technology will be offered independently of IM and email products”

I thought this sort of thing was called a busy lamp field in days gone by, but I could be wrong.

Click to Dial allows you to locate a number in some contact database and call it, but if the user is then handling the ongoing conversation on their telephone device - this precludes all other potential channels of communication - and it misses the point.

By Contrast, UC is about delivering a single user interface for Real Time Conversations - and these conversations need handling tools. See the picture below.

We’re all getting used to conversations being started in any of multiple modes, including IM, Telephone, Audio, Web, Video and Desktop conferences. The challenge is a consistent and single interface to handle the conversation

We might want to

• put people on hold
• mute them
• invite someone else either by IM phone or email (or by clicking their name)
• Consult with another colleague separately on a different channel 
• drop a specific person
• start a desktop share or make a presentation
• Record the whole thing

The tool also needs to do two things - show whether someone is at their desk, or not, and show when they’re on the phone (that defines presence for me). The first one is simple, the second can be approached in any number of different ways.

The ultimate goal is to share this information with people that you choose, in any organisation and whatever phone device you happen to be using. 

Have you seen a single interface to handle all of those conversations? Not many people have as yet, but it doesn’t stop them claiming to have a UC solution

My Teamwork from Alcatel Lucent has the best conversation GUI that I have seen and it also solves a lot of the problems that desktop installed solutions would have by being completely browser based, meaning that anyone can join in with any channel of communication.

It also covers a little of the other two aspects of UC, by which I mean incoming call handling and application integration.

People often tell me that they want one presence tool to use - that their screens are full of different interfaces.

I can see the point, but really I think you probably do need two at least. If you’re at work, it doesn’t seem right to be available to all your buddies and family…does it? I mean interruptions can take 20 minutes to get over and back to being fully focussed on your work, which is hardly fair to the employer.

At work, we have settled on a single tool for work activity, and this seems to be well regarded in terms of only being used as instant messaging if important, and to see when people are on the phone. It is distinct and walled.

In addition, we all probably have another tool for friends and family, switched off or rarely used during the working day. Although because we all have a choice of dozens, it will probably fall to people like Trillian Software and Meebo to persuade us to use a single interface to inter-connect to all of them.

Ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper, I have harboured visions of a telephone handset built in next to a screen, which I could pick up, anytime I wanted more information from a website owner and immediately speak to someone connected with the page. I wouldn’t have to know or enter the number.

A little more daydreaming would see the the right hunt group in the call centre or company product sales, called automatically based on the page - of course, and when they answered, a screen would come up on their CRM (remember that?), which would have the screen I was looking at, as well as my details.

There is definitely movement and services like Sitofono, are a very simple implementation of it, without the bells….well, er, it is actually the bells, and not the whistles. Click for the owner to call you.

Then, there is a quote from a product website called Contactatonce.com, who markets a solution that allows website visitors to IM, or chat, with people in the organisation in real time. An excerpt,

A sales rep for one of the ContactAtOnce! enabled car dealerships in Atlanta forwarded me a conversation he recently had with a prospect. Excerpting:

[07:00:30 PM][SalesRep] What do you think of this instant connect tool ?
[07:00:38 PM][Customer] It is really great
[07:00:52 PM][SalesRep] Good to hear, we are trying it out.
[07:00:55 PM][Customer] The only reason why I chose your dealership is because I can talk to you now
[07:01:05 PM][Customer] If not I would not even have contacted your company
[07:01:10 PM][Customer] so 1 positive for this

Sometimes, the customers say the most eloquent things…

I like this - but it is wise to let the visitors speak to you first.

For instance, with Meebo, a web based IM system that allows you to build in a client to your blog or website (it’s down there on the right hand side somewhere), you get audibly notified when someone is on your page - don’t worry, I forget to log on most days and I rarely notice in the hubbub

However, I did notice on Sunday for a change, and after about half an hour I decided to interact. At which point the visitor scarpered instantly, and who could blame them. It’s a bit like stalking in reverse isn’t it?

Imagine if you will, browsing to a website, you see a head turn, and say - “can I help you?”

I’m just looking, you say….

How ghastly can you get, if I wanted to be in a shoe shop, I’d go shopping more than once a year. Not all daydreams are worth going on with.

The place to start thinking about presence is with the most simple change of status.

If I’m logged in at the desktop, I may be available, but if I’m not logged in, then I may only be contactable by the telephone.

So, call me if you need to.

The ‘need to call me’ part is of most significance here, and there are two sides to the benefit of being logged out;

1. Calls from my contacts are now more sporadic, because with them knowing I’m away from my desk, it allows them to re-schedule that item of middling importance for when I AM at my laptop screen, and hence more able to deliver.

2. So, logic says, and experience bears out, that when people now call me, they have already made a decision not to wait until I return to my desk. Which means my calls are nearly always more important.

The result is that when I’m mobile, I get less calls, and they’re more important

What this means is that when you roll out presence tools, it’s important that management communicate the importance of not hiding behind the ‘make it seem like you’re offline’ tool. Instead, use busy, or not interruptable wherever possible. The distinction is important for others in their decision making.

Equally, if I log on to some mobile presence element of the tool - there needs to be distinction between mobile and desk, for the reasons above.

The fact is, managing my mobile ’status’ will probably interrupt my attention, and therefore isn’t worth the effort. The only mobile status of interest to me is whether we’re on the phone or not - which we will have to spoof, awaiting desperately needed innovation.

With that in mind, I am still a fan of the iotum approach, especially from a subject driven conversation point of view.