Wait just a minute
But a number of technological factors are likely to make the march to presence a slow one, beginning with the current hodgepodge state of corporate IM. The majority of instant messaging in the workplace still occurs via consumer services such as those offered by America Online and Yahoo. Few companies have adopted internal messaging systems like Sametime and LCS, and fewer still have required employees to centralise on them, because neither consumer services nor corporate systems can talk to each other.
"IM has pretty much grown from the bottom up -- people have installed their systems instead of waiting for IT to do it for them," Osterman said. "The lack of interoperability means that if you are forced by your employer to switch to a new IM system, you can't communicate with the people you used to, which is pretty hard to get people to accept." That makes interoperability the critical stumbling block "for near-term success with presence."
Microsoft and others are counting on adherence to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standard, which allows voice and Internet Protocol (IP) systems to work together, and the SIP for Instant Messaging (SIMPLE) to settle compatibility problems.
"We are fundamental believers in the idea of unified communications," Pall said. "That's one of the reasons we chose to go with SIP -- you can take this system and work with your existing telephone network. SIP is absolutely the magic glue that brings all of this together."
But standards only solve part of the problem, said IDC's Mahowald. Presence data will contain a lot of information that companies are unlikely to want to share with the whole world. For true presence to work, there will need to be a "secure cloud" that can intelligently share presence information between different corporate systems.
"It's the technological problem of actually publishing my presence information outside the firewall into a secure cloud so someone else can see it -- that's going to take a leap of faith," he said. "It's going to need some kind of honest, trusted broker in the middle." But at the moment, Mahowald doesn't envision any kind of a cloud above the Internet that's secure enough for corporations to be willing to use it.
