CommuniGate's Pronto! Client Opens Up the Communication Senses

When communicating with others, we all rely greatly on our visual sense. During a phone conversation, for example, have you ever wanted to see the other person's expressions when they said something or heard some news? We've found that the visually energetic delivery of messages in business, such as from a CEO, is very desirable. Such capability is also welcomed among consumers for intimate communications between family members. Multimedia Messaging, or MMS, is very popular to send a quick video, often laden with emotion, like a birthday greeting, or where you have caught a "moment" with your mobile's cam, and you want to share that with people.

Modern communications is increasingly a hybrid, capable of multi-channel connections between people such as phone + IM, or video + audio, involving multiple senses. You see it on the Web, with Flash technologies, or in support centers where you can chat with the technicians live. Rich Media Communications delivery is highly visual and uses multimedia to stimulate more than one of our senses. According to the Wikipedia, Rich Media is interactive multimedia, but we like to think of Rich Media here at CommuniGate Systems as taking a media type to a higher level.

However, if multimedia is too difficult to use or not really beneficial, such as a disruption in the work place, what good is it, other than a nice distraction? Rich Media can appear in simple things such as talking on the phone while IM'ing others, often times to get info on how to answer things we might not know at that moment. But by taking Rich Media and making it fit a business process or a consumer lifestyle, things really get interesting.

If you look at how people work in most offices, you will find a dashboard for their email and scheduling, maybe Outlook, but you will also see IM clients, and music clients such as iTunes or Windows Media Player. We have become very dependent upon our email and scheduling over time. In fact, the calendar application itself produces a lot of traffic these days involving invites, acceptance notices, attachments, updates to meetings, and notes containing PIN codes for conferences. In fact, most of the business communications have become all wrapped up in that client, Outlook.

When we at CommuniGate Systems began development of our new concept of a client framework, it was not to just make another Outlook, but bring Rich Media into users' hands. We set out to not just dump a lot of new features on the desktop, but design a framework that becomes a client-side application server. You probably have heard of applications servers, but a client, which can run applications designed to fit organizational or individual requirements, is quite unique. We called this new framework Pronto!, and we built this in Adobe's Flex2 technology for Flash players.

We of course needed our new client application server to have excellent integration of the fundamentals such as email and calendaring, but the basic concept was to create a client that brings together all of the new forms of communications elegantly, whereby all forms of IP communications can be accessed via one address ([email protected]) any place and any time. I like to think of Pronto! as what comes next or in the post-Outlook era, rather than being just "old wine in new bottles". Pronto! needed to be able to serve up interesting applications like IM and Presence, but hook into the existing calendar functions, so you can see a person's presence, and perhaps IM them quickly before you make an appointment. Or, have the calendar decide when calls can ring my devices; am I in an appointment? Is the caller an important person that can barge in or be redirected to a colleague?

Think about how we work today. Many of us like to play music while we work - this is not really anything new, but think about that music being available in the client, no matter where you are logged on. Another interesting application we see a lot of these days is blogs. What if that info were also in the same client, and I could drag music up to the blog and make it available anyplace? It starts to become really useful if I am sitting and listening to a seminar speech, and that blog is available through my mobile, with the same Flash client, and I can update it in real time. Or, as I walk out of a seminar, I see a friend, and decide to Bluetooth him over a few of those songs, from the same client.

I don't know about you, but I tend to be connected a lot, either by the computer or the mobile I carry. But many of us also manage to have some time available in the day to watch TV. What if that same communications client were available in the set-top box? What if I could see phone calls as they come in to me, and decide whether or not to answer them? Would that not be pretty nice to hear in my surround sound system? Well, perhaps my wife would not like that so much, so instead I could decide to retrieve that call on my mobile and step out of the room. These examples demonstrate that our means of communications need to be more fluid, and not constrained to one particular network or the other. The buzz word for this is FMC, or fixedmobile convergence. My lifestyle is such that I roam between fixed lines, such as DSL and my LAN at work, to wireless, and then sometimes to cable networks.

We built Pronto! using Adobe's Flash for a variety of reasons, among them security and portability, as I have shown, but most importantly because of its multimedia capabilities. The ability to see a person in a static video, or a videoconference, or even in IPTV, is all about different usage types of Rich Media. Having the right client architecture unlocks the real capabilities of communications for different lifestyles and business needs.

Have a look at Pronto yourself, or download a free 5-user copy and run it today - www.communigate.com/pronto/

Jon Doyle is Vice President, Business Development, at CommuniGate Systems (http://www.communigate.com). (news - alert)