"We believe presence is one of those fundamental new capabilities that come along very rarely," Pall said. In an electronic world, presence lets "you look up and see who's around you."
He gave this example of how it might work: "Let's say I'm offline, but the person who's calling is Bill Gates. The (presence) agent can see that this looks like an important call, and it should be forwarded to my cellphone. That's a very useful pivot."
Presence is also likely to get a substantial boost in a few years as Microsoft follows through on plans to incorporate its features in Longhorn, the next version of the Windows operating system. Chairman Bill Gates discussed presence in a recent interview with CNET News.com.
"I think the idea that your address book should be usable by other applications, that your calendar should be accessible by other applications -- that is a big part of Longhorn," Gates said. "We move those rich user schemas down into the platform so that applications can all get at presence and phone numbers and annotate the address book, instead of things like each application having its own address book."
IDC Research Manager Robert Mahowald said support in Longhorn will be significant for popularising presence support. "It means presumably more and more companies are going to have the infrastructure to roll this stuff out," he said. "It'll just be there on the desktop."
IBM has equally ambitious goals for presence, looking to build on its Sametime messaging system to enable intelligent access in a variety of settings, said Ken Bisconti, vice president of Workplace products for Lotus.
"Presence awareness for us is a very ubiquitous piece of information that can be used in many, many types of applications," Bisconti said. "IM is just one of them." Others include customer service online forums and team work spaces. "I see someone else is online, so I can bounce an idea off him," he said. "It gives you preferred methods of interruption and access."
