When I talk to customers about SIP, Presence and Federation of Presence, “How do I gain this presence capability?” and more importantly “What does it mean to my business?” are the questions I get asked most. There are a number of answers to these questions and each answer brings more questions, too many for one blog in fact, but here are some quick examples: Presence is commonplace in Unified Communications solutions, but has the potential of driving new levels of customer care in the contact center by making expert resources readily available to respond to a customer issue. Presence powers Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), which can use rich presence to ensure that the right resources are available before the system reaches out to them to resolve a business problem.
A presence server can collect and disseminate rich presence from many third party sources that also support presence. By leveraging a set of collectors, which link the core presence capabilities with these other presence sources, Avaya, one of TSG’s strategic partners, is able to bridge presence information across a diverse set of business environments.
The Intelligent Presence Server works in concert with other presence-enabling capabilities provided by Avaya. In addition to showing presence in Avaya desktop clients and IP phones, Avaya presence solutions extend to a wide array of business communications applications.
On-the-phone status can be seen in Microsoft Office Communicator and applications like Outlook and SharePoint that use Smart Tags. Phone status is also viewable in IBM Lotus Sametime and applications using Live Names, such as Lotus Notes and Jabber instant messaging, making the decision of how and when to communicate much more effective.
When client software from Avaya, Microsoft, IBM Lotus and Adobe is integrated with Avaya Meeting Exchange for an audio-only or web conference call, a roster of call participants and the speaker is shown. Video applications utilize presence to show continuous presence (the ability to see multiple video participants at the same time) or the active speaker in a video call. In today’s tough economic climate and with travel and hotel costs rising dramatically, video and distance learning will become increasingly important as well.
