Conversationware

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.

Why spend time, sweat and tears writing your predictions for the coming year.

Relax in your armchair instead, with your google persistent search turned on for the first week in January, and peruse until you find some you agree with - then link to them.

My interest is in how communications can help with business, in all senses of the word and to my mind, the best on the subject is a great article by Shomik Banerjee summarising 2007 and looking at 2008 for enterprise communications. Really good job.

Of course, I have to comment, or it’s not worth linking

Shomik doesn’t say if the headlined views below are in order of importance, or likelihood;

• A) PBX is passé, ‘UC’ is the buzzterm
• B) The Focus Market for Enterprise Telephony is Shifting to SMB
• C) Enterprise Mobility is ‘Hot’
• D) Collaboration Gains Fresh Impetus
• E) SOA and Web Services Gain Traction
• F) Open Source and Open System Gain Mindshare

In terms of market impact, I would have them in roughly the reverse order.

(maybe not by the end of 2008 though)

Another good read is by Charlie Bess on the EDS fellows ‘next big thing blog’. I like the Green IT idea, and I guess this is just an acceleration of the virtualization movement, which has been manic paced in any event.

Feel free to link to others in the comments!

   It feels like the calm before the carnage.

This week, Microsoft aimed at the Enterprise market with OCS, and Microsoft Admins over the world pricked up their ears.

To be able to apply their hard earned Active Directory and networking skills to telephony, and not to mention finding a new use for all that spare rack space, it must have felt like heaven.

At the other end, the SMB’s also got something. For those who have never heard of Active Directory in other words, 3 Com announced it’s support for the open source Asterisk PBX. This aimed squarely at those interested in a good deal for their telephone plumbing. 

Open source lacks credibility? Well, here’s some  - and an excellent article from Dan York indicates some traction. Comparing Asterisk to the rise of Linux is probably spot on from what I’ve seen recently.

Trixbox had a stand at IP07 - (I thought it was VOIP for business show, my mistake), and it looked like theirs was one of the busiest stands. A cool colour scheme must be the reason.

Anyone who says Asterisk won’t be a player, well, that’s like saying no corporate would ever install linux based applications.

Back in May we saw $6.5B of linux server sales in a quarter. That’s only 7 or 8 years worth of activity, without credibility.

Genesys supporting Asterisk is somewhat of a suprise given who they’re owned by,  but hedging bets was never a bad thing. 

So - two potentially massively impactful solutions gain traction on a crowded staid technology market. The neighbourhood just isn’t the same any more - that banging sound must be the ‘for sale’ signs going up.

I have often teased telephony types and asked them ‘what’s the point of VOIP, or IP Telephony systems? Well, I found a plausible answer.

My semi serious point was originally because companies spend money on infrastructure and skills to change to IPT, and to me, it wasn’t immediately evident what the benefits are, and, well frankly, how do you measure ROI?

Well, I found a reasonable answer regarding old telephone system replacement which I thought I’d share. Bear with me….what I’m getting at here, is that completely open Third Party CTI interfaces cost different amounts on different switches, and it is extremely important for Unified Communications (Unified Messaging is fine either way)

If you buy the wrong telephony platform, you may not not realise that the CTI interface costs a fortune (£40K), and that no clever developers are likely going to bother trying to sell to customers with that overhead (when they can sell to customers who don’t have those costs instead)

NB: FOR THOSE THINKING SIP - ITS NOT A THIRD PARTY CTI, SO YOU’RE NOT COVERED

The wrong switch then, will likely restrict you to telephone system manufacturer’s software, or possibly their selected partners’, which often won’t integrate to the things you want it to. 

Worse, when you try and justify UC in particular, the ROI is still in early stages, and adding a wodge of cash to the bill just ain’t going to help you deploy very useful tools for your information workers.

As I understand it, IPT companies Mitel and Cisco are delivering the the right subset of CTI connectivity out of the box. UC developers and customers are not far behind. My Mitel partner friends knew that I wasn’t anti, and now I proved it

Now I don’t know if Mitel have proof that Shoretel ’stole’ their ideas, but from the comment in this post, it would seem that the recent patent claims are so broad as to be laughable. I await the details with interest.
More than that, to file a complaint such as this on the morning of the Shoretel IPO, no less, even if it turned out the infringements were justified, is going to inflict maximum cost and negative publicity. In the wrong light, it could be viewed as a form sabotage, and it has to make you wonder just how desperate Mitel are starting to look, in an industry in turmoil (once more)
The patent system itself would seem to have just managed to achieve precisely the opposite of what it was designed to do. The little guy was supposed to be protected, and instead you can see innovators becoming dead meat. Incidentally, some people don’t deserve to own an idea - particularly those who are terrible at executing them.
Because of the timing, I’m sure Mitel have shot themselves in the foot. I for one am not sure their motives will escape the inevitable scrutiny.

Over on Aswath weblog, there is a useful suggestion on how Jajah could enable their dialing service without users having to be in front of their PC - Jajah are already promoting the ability to call without headphones - something that always put me off Skype.

I like the idea of a home phone being internet enabled, I guess everything will be before long. But if this is the case, perhaps the phonebook be online and automatically accessible by the phone display instead. 

A centralised phonebook accessible from any device, with click (press) to call would give the same experience as the PSTN, but improve it, because numbers are then also available from your desktop and from your browser enabled mobile.

The strength of Jajah, that calling is ubiquitous and doesn’t rely on any specific islands of connectivity, unlike some voip, is enhanced by giving contact information the same qualities.

Until then, phonebooks on mobile devices will continue to be a handy way of ‘encouraging’ call traffic through whichever network the devices are connected to - a lot of remote workers will still use their mobile because the numbers are on the phone….mainly because inbound callers’ details are so easy to add to the address book.

I always thought that connecting to someone (calling) should be done by clicking on a link, and that these links would ‘front’, or mask, the eventual device the call is delivered on. Abstracting contact details from the device you receive the call on would deliver us from yet another pain point - and deliver my personal holy grail, being a self updating phone book.

A phonebook that updates itself anytime a user changes device, which could be up to three or four times a day. That’s neat.

The picture quality isn’t great, but I was walking along at the time with my qtek PDA. I was suprised to see today that British Telecom are still training people to climb telephone poles.

They even have a cordoned off section so that up to 50 people can be up their own pole at once. I missed the best picture by an hour, so I must presume the trainees left up there in my picture were having to do it all over again (poling laggards?)

Why wouldn’t they be training people, but I was working with one of the most advanced VOIP solutions company in the UK onsite today. Myself and a colleague were extolling the advantages of a truly remarkable combined Unified Communications solution set - it was a nice counterpoint.

VOIP services and softphones are often ‘too difficult’ for me to comprehend, so I’m pleased Intel has patented the softphone and I’m unlikely to see too many more of these around. I share a lot of the sentiment in this quote -

“I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone. - Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++

I’m far better off with software interfaces that don’t need any instructions - like my ipod. I hope the interface Intel come up with is a good one.

The Realtime Community blogged about Jaduka, which would seem to be an IVR with a web interface for callbacks.

One key point for me is that calling someone in this instance driven by a web interface to the call generator - which means you don’t need to know someone’s number to contact them. Looking forward, from a unified communications point of view some sort of availability before I clicked to call, plus the ability to converse with other media would be great too.

But, it strikes me that if the IVR were actually the PSTN switch, then this would be an enabler for web telephony. By that I mean not the transport of calls, but the call control. If you had a web interface for the actual call - you could introduce files, conference someone else in, go on a web tour….all generating minutes and service revenue for the Operator.

Shouldn’t this be an innovation already brought to market? Oh wait, the pstn network (or overblown IVR platform) as an intelligent and developery platform looks like it’s moving steps closer with Grand Central, as blogged on Oreilly Emerging Telephony blog.

Also, incidentally, for presence, who better to know the status of an telephony endpoint than the telephony network itself. For instance, if I click to call a colleague on a mobile phone, then the network has the status of that mobile phone that it could publish to previously trusted parties, in or outside of the enterprise.