Until that problem is solved, presence is likely to be restricted to internal silos within corporate firewalls. "That's where it may remain for a few years -- internal use and trusted partners outside the company who can actually look at presence," Mahowald said. "I'm not sure when the next leap is going to happen to get it beyond that."
And technical problems may just be the start of the barriers. Human factors, ranging from privacy concerns to plain laziness, are likely to hamper adoption of any presence system that isn't fully automatic. After all, current IM clients offer a wealth of choices for signifying availability status, yet most folks display a steady "I'm available" all day.
Mark Stratton, senior vice president of global marketing for Siemens Information and Communication Networks, said human factors have turned out to be the biggest challenge in popularising OpenScape, a Siemens application that integrates with Outlook to intelligently route correspondents among email, IM, cellphones and landlines.
"We've learned that the big thing with presence is discipline in the end user," Stratton said. "If I have a presence state that never changes, it's not much different from no presence at all."
Stratton said an important factor is to motivate workers by showing how well-managed presence information can cut down on email strings and eliminate phone tag.
Judy Quire, assistant to the president of the University of Kentucky, said such concrete results have been the key to winning rapid acceptance for IBM's Sametime messaging system among university administrators. "It definitely cuts down on phone tag -- that's my biggest reason for loving it," she said. "If I can see someone's online, I can get an answer right away and it makes it easier for everyone."
Beyond that, presence systems have to work as automatically as possible, Stratton said. "The system needs to intelligently pull together signals from a lot of different sources." It needs to be able to look at your calendar, determine whether your cellphone is off or on, know which Bluetooth system you're connected to. "It's not a signal from a single environment that helps a system work," he said.
Microsoft's Pall agreed. "We need to make it as automatic as possible," he said. "If presence becomes another thing that I have to actively manage as part of my work, people will not use it as much as they could."
