That's the buzz as Microsoft, IBM and a host of related technology companies push the idea of "presence," which is the notion that computing systems will know where their users are and help others make smarter choices about how to get in touch. Instead of filling up your voice mail, correspondents will see that you're in a noncritical meeting and shoot you a discreet IM. Or your supervisor will see that you're out on a sales call and be redirected to your cellphone, after passing a bosses-only interruption test.
That's how the story goes. For now, presence is limited to basic and often error-prone status-reporting tools used in IM clients, plus a few cutting-edge experiments to integrate IM and email systems. True presence, where everybody who needs to contact you knows where you are and what you're doing, is years off and requires surmounting a host of technical, business and behavioural challenges.
"It's not on anybody's priority list for the next two or three years," said Melanie Turek, an analyst for Nemertes Research. "You're talking about spending a fair amount of money and changing the way people work for something where the payback is kind of soft. Anytime you say, 'it's going to make people more productive,' CIOs start to roll their eyeballs. They want something you can measure."
The promise of presence sounds convincing, though, when you listen to the two companies most likely to profit it from it, IBM and Microsoft. Advanced presence means integrating email servers and corporate IM servers, voice communications and collaboration systems that allow remote access to centrally stored documents. Microsoft and IBM are the two companies with interests in all those areas.
"I think largely we'll see similar market share to what we see in email," where Microsoft's Exchange and IBM's Lotus/Domino split the market, said Michael Osterman, founder of Osterman Research.
Gurdeep Singh Pall, Microsoft's general manager for Live Communications Server (LCS), the company's enterprise IM server, considers presence a key building block for future software releases. The latest version of Microsoft's Office productivity software already includes some basic presence capability by integrating with a SharePoint collaboration server to display the status of a shared document and the people working on it. Future advances will add the Exchange email server, Outlook email client and voice systems to the mix.
