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March 2007 SIP Magazine
Volume 2 / Number 2

Jump In, the Water's Fine

By Dave Uhlir, COLUMNS: Presence Enabled

 
 

Instant messaging is at once the Trojan Horse and Achilles Heel of presence. IM has introduced people to the power of presence in delivering more synchronous interpersonal communications. At the same time, IM has helped balkanize the technology as vendors and customers came to understand presence as something living exclusively within applications (like chat) that they can wholly own. Fragmenting the IM market has slowed and complicated efforts to integrate presence within mainstream network communications technologies, while scaring away some customers with a false choice between VHS or Beta. In the early days of networking, it took HTTP, HTML and Web 1.0 visionaries to convince mainstream IT that the water’s fine and its time jump in because there is more to networked computers than sharing some files and a printer. A similar challenge confronts the Web 2.0 visionary as it is a common sentiment in IT that if I don’t care about IM or collaboration software, I don’t have to care about presence enabling my network.

Lying at the heart of Web 2.0, live services, mashups, et al., is a comprehension of presence as living everywhere, but never wholly somewhere. That presence is collectively owned by a dynamically shifting hierarchy of people and systems exchanging variable information about their status that affects the flow of data and media. Realtime information on the status of people, information, and things has great value to a wide range of specific applications — but it is not, should not, and I submit technically cannot be owned by a specific application.

This is an important architectural distinction. When thinking about presence solely in terms of your application, the tendency is towards bolting a presence engine onto existing application servers. This passageway is full of traps and dead ends. One is in trying to leverage an existing application server’s online transaction processing techniques. . . Really? Are you suggesting that the fact that my presence changed from available to on the phone requires transaction processing levels of verification? Okay, what happens when we add these layers of verification, will running this architecture push presence updates fast enough to be relevant? Will it scale to handle all the nodes of a unified communications system? Ultimately you have to ask yourself if you want to know what my presence was, or what it is!




As it turns out, building your own presence server is really, really hard. You can do it, but developing the knowhow to make it scale is costly, and don’t forget to ensure your application can exchange presence with other networked entities lest you create yet another messaging island, and what’s the point in that.

While scalability and latency shouldn’t be much of a concern for things like chat, even when adding the simple automated presence changes that can be pulled from a PBX or Outlook calendar, they matter a great deal once you start considering a world in which anything that is IPaddressable can be given the ability to publish its current status and subscribe to events relevant to its process(es). Moreover, people will interact with all of these systems in a lot of different ways and from a lot of different places for all types of reasons. At that point, your application could be spending all of its cycles just trying to keep up with the presence changes published to the network.

Walking towards the light, we start to see applications outfitted with simple XML transceivers while the heavy lifting is done by dedicated presence servers that don’t require the overhead of a runtime environment. Applications are freed to communicate only what has changed, leaving it to the server to determine who cares and why. As better and more efficient consumers and publishers of presence information, applications can exchange more information with more points of presence in real-time, while driving more value into the aggregate of information exchanged.

Today, as it was back when IT came to understand the value of networking, we have standard protocols such as SIP, RTP, and XMPP that have warmed the water. The visionaries are experimenting and already tapping into this new pool of information drawn from existing network services to create even more powerful applications and add-ons. Now it’s time for the mainstream to jump in and discover that there’s more to presence and real-time collaboration than IM, a PowerPoint presentation, and a conference call.

Dave Uhlir is vice president of marketing and product management for Jabber. (news - alert) For more information, visit the company online at http://www.jabber.com.

 

 

 


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