Some day your PC will be able to tell minute-by-minute how others should communicate with you, based on where you are, what you're doing and who's trying to make contact. But for now, it would still be nice if you changed your instant messaging status when you go to lunch.
That's the buzz as Microsoft, IBM and a host of related technology companies push the idea of "presence," 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 non-critical meeting and shoot you a discreet IM. Or your supervisor will see that you're out on a sales call and be routed 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 e-mail 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. Any time 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 e-mail 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 e-mail," 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 e-mail server, Outlook e-mail client and voice systems to the mix.
"We believe presence is one of those fundamental new capabilities that come along very rarely," Mr. 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 off-line, 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," Mr. 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 popularizing 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."
