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SOA/WEB SERVICES FEATURE ARTICLES


March 10, 2006

It�s Not About �Presence�

By Alan Rosenberg, BlueNote Networks


The other day I was talking with Hal Clark, one of the product managers here at BlueNote Networks. We were talking about presence – the ability to view the availability of someone you wish to communicate with. Most people are familiar with this concept as “away messages” in an instant-messaging system.
 
Hal was reinforcing to me that it’s not about presence; no one cares where you are, or cares if you’re typing in Microsoft Word, or cares to read your away message. What they care about is reachability. And no one wants the hassle of having to keep presence information up-to-date, what they care about is contact.
 
Reachability. It’s the driving force behind optimizations in call centers. Reachability is input into data-center processes, not the end-game. Reachability allows programs to view into the telecommunications complex and simply determine if a person is reachable. Not “how can they be reached,” not “what are they doing and where are they right now,” but simply is this person reachable.
 
The telecommunication system, if properly constructed, will take the “how” and “where” cues from the receivers (i.e., for us Bellheads, the called-party) provisioning and configuration information.
 
There’s a subtle (and novel, but don’t tell Hal) twist to “presence vs. reachability.” Today, using typical presence tools, the calling-party is responsible for the reachability of the called-party. We do it all the time – try the office, next the cell phone, maybe the home phone, and so on. No answer at a number we called, or information in an “away message” gives hints to the calling-party as to how to reach the called-party, but the heavy-lifting is left to our dialing finger.
 
This is a pretty sad state of affairs, and causes real problems in an environment where we really want someone to answer the phone (call centers) or where reaching one specific person is paramount (high-value clients that get personalized attention). Leaving it up to the calling-party (the customer or high-value client in this case) is not only a burden, it’s unacceptable.
 
This is where reachability comes into play. Reachability allows the called-party to provide information to a telecommunication system as to where they can be reached, and how they can be reached. The typical way to enforce this reachability today is to hand out only your cell phone number – the burden is removed from the calling-party. But this only works for personal communications, it doesn’t work for managing hunt-groups, IVR, or ACD. Nor does it work when the enterprise is managing their telecommunications budget or trying to eliminate the geographical ties of current call-center design.
 
 
Can presence systems become reachability systems? Some can, some can’t. One of the biggest complaints with presence is that no-one wants to fiddle with his/her “away message,” or otherwise teach the presence system about his/her presence. Even still, there’s a problem of the presence information either being burdensome to the calling-party, or the called-party loosing control of the presence that the system puts in place automatically.
 
Consider the leveraging of a Microsoft Exchange calendar as presence information. If a person is marked “in a meeting” or “busy,” are they still reachable? Does being in a meeting imply that customers shouldn’t expect to reach you? (It certainly doesn’t here at BlueNote!) Furthermore, being marked “busy” does not give any hints as to how to reach this person. Should you try the cell phone? Should you call another team-member? Leave a message?
 
The burden is squarely on the shoulders of the calling-party. What’s needed is a way for the called-party to teach the telecommunication system about how they want to be reached in a way that crosses telecommunication system boundaries. They should be able to define when they want to be reached and for what reasons not to contact them (conditional reachability) and this should affect the PBX, the PSTN, the VoIP system and their cell phones.
 
I certainly don’t want to put in my away message “Hey, call me on my cell phone unless you’re my mom in which case the update on Aunt Sadie’s bunions is going to have to wait. Can you call me at home later?” Again, leaving your reachability up to the calling-party takes the control away from you and away from the enterprise infrastructure.
 
And the enterprise infrastructure matters. You should be reachable in the least expensive way if the enterprise is footing the bill. You should be reachable during office hours, but then reachability is conditional in the off-hours. Business processes and call centers involve interactive communications and should take your reachability as input.
 
The need is to have the ability to combine your reachability information both with the information of others, and with the provisioned reachability rules of the enterprise and business process as a whole. You simply can’t do this with IM “away-messages” and calendar-interpretation combined with head-scratching by the calling-party.
 
Here at BlueNote our reachability is under the control of each individual user. Most people have their voicemails emailed to them (and hence their presence is irrelevant because they can read their email from anywhere), but some have their home-office phones ring when their office phone rings. One even has voicemails left on our office system emailed to his cell phone. Reachable. Under the user’s control, or the enterprise control, or both. Available for programs to use as input. And the people that call us have no idea that we do these things. That’s the power of reachability.
 
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Brian Silver is CTO with BlueNote Networks. He specializes in enterprise voice and multimedia software platforms, applications, tools, and Web-service interfaces. He can be reached at [email protected].

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