Presence - Dial tone of this century ...

How many times you have wanted to make an important business or a personal call, and picked up the phone to call the other party, but the call ended unsuccessfully, since all you managed to reach was the other party's voice mail? Such unsuccessful calls can be a serious drag on productivity and not to mention the frustration it causes, since instead of talking to each other the parties get to talk to the infamous 'voice mail'.

Or maybe the person you thought was in office actually was on the customer site today and was not reachable on his office number you just dialed. Well this brings in the concept of 'presence' which is so prevalent in the IM world. You begin to chat with a party only when his icon in the chat indicates that he is 'present'.

Now wouldn't that be really nice if we can apply this concept to telephone dialing as well. And why just telephones, we should be able to extend the concept of presence far beyond that.

A user, may opt for several ways in which he can be reached, phone, IM, SMS, Email etc. All of these are different modes of reaching the person. Now, imagine that this same person, can specify or update a unique "address" or a "URI" for each of the means to reach him. Then under his buddy icon, in a client application ( a universal communicator client), on right clicking his name, there appear several of these options to interact with him.

Clicking on the URI corresponding to a phone, will place a IP telephony based call, clicking the URI for email, could launch an application capable of sending an email. As long as the person has kept his information updated on the "Presence" server, the other parties are always able to get in touch with the person, based on his preferences of course.

Thus it would be appropriate to call "Presence" as the dial tone of this century. SIP ( Session Initiation Protocol ) seems to be right way to achieve this kind of communications.

From the portal perspective, the concept of "Presence" makes an absolute sense, since portal is a great way of achieving collaboration and bringing people together. Using a SIP server and a proxy, it seems that getting this above mentioned concept of "presence" into a portal has great potential value. Watch this space for more information on this topic.