5B9EA-Alcatel Intelligent Rich Presence-En

Technology White Paper

Instant Messaging (IM) emerges as a powerfulcommunication tool, not just for teenagers but also inthe enterprise. After enjoying the early benefits of the“raw” presence IM provides, we are now beginningto leverage the power of presence in combinationwith telephony and collaboration tools. Most“information workers” today routinely use a computerand a telephone. Implementing rich presence in theenterprise infrastructure enables people to improvetheir communication experience by using these twodevices in a coherent manner, with fluid interactionsbetween both. This not only delivers more productivity(faster interactions) but also more creativity in the wayusers manage incompletely formalized businessprocesses or find missing data. Rich presence willbecome the “dial tone” of the 21st century.

Rich Presence: A New User Communications Experience

2 - Alcatel Telecommunications Review - 1st Quarter 2005 www.alcatel.com/atr

J. Jachner, S. Petrack, E. Darmois, T. Ozugur

RICH PRESENCE: A NEW USERCOMMUNICATIONS EXPERIENCERich presence brings additional flexibility and creativity to the management of user interactions, making it a primeexample of how user-centric technologies deliver a competitive advantage.

The communication interface that enterprise workers usedaily has changed regularly over the years. Some of these

changes, such as Dual Tone MultiFrequency (DTMF) dialingfor telephones in the 1960s and the World Wide Web (WWW)for the Internet, have generated entire new businesses anddriven fundamental changes in the way individuals behave. Thelatest evolution of the communication interface is linked to theemergence of Instant Messaging (IM) and Presence, whichhave similar potential to instigate change and create new busi-ness opportunities.

IM has been made popular by teenagers using simpleclients, like those from Microsoft and AOL. One key reason forIM’s success is that it offers a simple way to display the pres-ence of “buddies” (i.e. the contacts registered in the IM client).Presence in IM is real-time information on the relationship ofa user (a buddy, a colleague) to one or more devices and/or net-works (on-line, off-line, busy, etc).

Even this simple form of presence alters the way in whichusers communicate by introducing a more interactive and lessformal approach (even than e-mail!). Nevertheless, despite itsappeal, the acceptance of presence and IM in enterprisesdepends on key issues being resolved, such as ease of use, secu-rity and accuracy.

Two concurrent approaches are being used to develop therole of presence. One is to combine presence information fromcomputers and telephones to integrate voice and computercommunication tools. This has started, an example being theInstant Collaboration System (ICS) that Alcatel has acquiredfrom eDial, and which is being integrated into several products.The other is the extension to Rich Presence, which is theaggregation of presence from many sources and the intelligentmanagement of user and enterprise preferences. Together,these approaches will expand users’ communication potentialand broaden the range of instant decisions they can make.

� Presence and the New Communication InterfaceThe range of communication tools available to enterprise

users has widened over the years from basic telephony, to e-mail with the rise of the personal computer, and now with therise of always-connected broadband to new interactive tools:currently IM, with video starting to emerge. This has createdbusiness opportunities for collaboration, that is, for groups ofusers to communicate on-line and share information, create andedit documents, etc. Today, on-line collaboration is the fastest

growing sector of communication in both numbers of users andnumbers of minutes. This trend is largely driven by theincreasing number of geographically distributed teams thatneed to work together.

However, the growth in communication media and support-ing devices, and in the huge amounts of information they gen-erate, is creating communication chaos for the user. Better inte-gration of media and devices is therefore required: presence willplay a central role in this unification, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Rich presence offers opportunities and raises issues for theusers and managers in an enterprise. On the positive side, itprovides users with accurate real-time information abouttheir contacts: there is no longer a need for “are you busy?”

messages. It also enables them to change more readily to themost suitable communication mode (see Figure 2) andreduces communication overload.

Expected benefits for the enterprise are increasedemployee productivity (less time lost in missed interactions)and increased group productivity (groups can instantlygenerate the information or make the decision required forthe continuity of a business process).

However, presence raises users’ concerns about ease ofuse (“I do not want to learn to use a new set of complextools”), privacy (“I do not want to be under permanentscrutiny”) and time management (“I do not want to beinvaded by unsolicited interactions”). There are concernsabout security for the enterprise (company information must

TECHNOLOGY WHITE PAPER

Telephony

VoiceVoice TextText

Rich PresenceRich Presence

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Fig. 1 Rich presence unifies interaction across media and devices

USER-CENTRIC CONFERENCING AND COLLABORATION

www.alcatel.com/atr 1st Quarter 2005 - Alcatel Telecommunications Review - 3

remain confidential) and aboutenterprise policy enforcement(employee behavior must complywith company rules). There is also aneed to bridge unrelated “silos” ofpresence coming from varioussources. All these concerns areaddressed by the emergence of arich presence infrastructure.

This infrastructure must supportbasic key services, like transparency,availability, scalability and serviceabil-ity, which are already offered by thecurrent solutions. In addition, provid-ing rich presence will require the ad

hoc solutions developed for “raw”presence to be turned into moresophisticated architectures.

� Presence, SIP, Voice: Multimedia, Multi-party CollaborationIn essence, collaboration is a multimedia communication:

users need to share, edit and create information, and mustcommunicate with other users simultaneously in order to doso. Numerous communication media are available (voice, video,text IM, etc), as well as many types of information (text, graph-ics, presentations, spreadsheet information, computer desk-top application data, etc). Clearly, it is cumbersome, if notimpossible, to use the voice channel of a phone call to deter-mine what capabilities and tools each participant has. Forexample, one participant might have had calls routed to amobile phone, and will therefore have no tools available. Fromthe collaboration point of view, this user’s presence is that heor she has nothing available but a voice channel.

To complicate matters, this kind of collaboration might berequired at any time. If users need to start up a special “meet-ing tool” to get their work done with remote colleagues, col-laboration will always be relegated to a niche, scheduled exis-tence within the enterprise workflow.

Two technology components are needed to resolve thisdilemma: a simple and intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI)for communication, and a signaling protocol that can trans-port rich presence information along with the communicationand collaboration signaling. The “rich GUI” for communica-tion must be available at all times, but not be intrusive. It mustlet users see quickly and simply what modes of communica-tion and what multimedia tools are available to them and toother users, both before and once a call is in session. The sig-naling protocol needs to be lightweight enough to scale up asdensely as phone call signaling in speed and volume, whilebeing rich enough to handle a dynamically changing set of peo-ple and terminals. Fortunately, both problems have field-proven solutions.

Numerous user interface metaphors have been tried. Themost common are a “meeting-table” (with avatar-like userssitting around a table), and a “tools” approach (which pres-ents a dashboard of tools from which a user can choose). Bothare poor choices. The idea of a “web meeting” is flawed asmost knowledge workers list meetings as the least produc-tive part of their work. Consequently, the idea of reproduc-ing a meeting room on-line is doomed to fail. Also, most peo-ple do not think about what tools they need; they simply usethem!

Ironically, the essential element in successful collabora-tion is to make it go away. People don’t want to go to meet-ings or collaborate or use tools – they simply want to get theirwork done, and need to communicate with others to achievethis. The most popular way to locate others and communi-cate when they are already on-line is via instant messaging.The IM interface is a list of “buddies”, or contacts, with anindication of their presence; this is a simple and natural wayto implement all real-time communication. This user inter-face metaphor is immediately understandable to anyone whomight already be using IM, and is easily expanded to includea rich set of presence indicators.

The ICS GUI is based on this simple idea. It shows the userall the complex multi-dimensional presence information ina way that is so intuitive that users don’t realize that it is“rich”. For example, in tests, users are often happy to dis-cover that they can see if someone is “on the phone” evenif they are off-line, but they don’t think of this in terms of two-dimensional presence. Figure 3 shows a sample screen shotof an ICS user’s console.

Users have a rich set of communication choices at theirdisposal: they can phone, exchange instant messages, par-ticipate in conferences, share applications, etc. Thesechoices are made clear by the simple presentation of richpresence information. In a sense, IM becomes a sort of “inter-active Caller ID”, making it possible to work with remote on-line colleagues, rather than just schedule a web meeting.

A great deal of user-centric technology is inherent in manyof the implicit choices displayed on the GUI. In a sense, such GUIsrepresent the next evolution in dialing technology, forty yearsafter touch-tones revolutionized the telephone user interface.

On the signaling front, ICS makes extensive use of theInternet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Session InitiationProtocol (SIP) standard. SIP was designed with the needs ofmultimedia multi-party sessions in mind. In fact, the use ofSIP for two-party telephony was first suggested by one of theauthors (Scott Petrack), because two-party audio-only callsseemed to be a trivial degenerated case of collaboration. Sim-ilarly, the use of SIP for IM and presence signaling stemmedpartly from the similarity of general asynchronous notifica-tion signaling to asynchronous telephone call state notifica-tions (ringing, disconnected), and partly from the fact thatcommunication / collaboration signaling has the greatest needfor presence notifications.

RICH PRESENCE: A NEW USER COMMUNICATIONS EXPERIENCE

InstantMessaging

VoiceCommunication

Conferencing(option if more

than two parties)

Collaboration(+doc sharing)

Video(Option)

Increasing communication efficiency

Rich Presence Infrastructure

Fig. 2 Presence (availability) of multiple media facilitates the initiation or escalation to multimedia


SIP is naturally multi-party, multimedia and mobilityaware. Most importantly, it is an Internet-friendly protocol,which integrates with all the other IETF protocols. Conse-quently, a SIP-based infrastructure, such as ICS, can ensurethat collaboration applications no longer have a “niche” sta-tus, by integrating them naturally with other connected Inter-net user applications.

� Evolution to an Intelligent, Rich Presence InfrastructureCurrent presence-enabled systems have proved the value

of presence in modeling user availability and facilitatingmultimedia interactions. The initial deployments have also pro-vided an insight into issues of user experience, and concernsabout privacy, security and administrator policy. The next gen-eration of systems is enhancing basic presence systems witha richer presence model together with intelligent processingto address these concerns. Figure 4 illustrates the function-ality of the Intelligent Rich Presence (IRP) infrastructure.

Rich presence expands the basic set of presence states, suchas active, on-line, off-line, on the phone, in a meeting, out

to lunch, etc. Proposed IETF standards to extend the presencestates (Rich Presence Extensions to the Presence InformationData Format; RPIDS) enrich the basic set with states that areapplicable to the broad consumer market (e.g. steering todenote the user is driving). Rich presence states also need tobe flexibly redefined to adapt to individual vertical markets orenterprise requirements, for example, on a customer call, on

the road and working remotely.

Rich presence aggregates user information from multipledevices, networks and applications to provide a more compre-hensive and accurate view of user status. For example, on the

phone is an aggregate of all a user’s voice devices: desktop, mobile,remote office and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) terminals.

Applications such as IM and calendar provide important user sta-tus information, such as on-line or in a meeting.

Multimedia presence is aggregated to a composite user availabil-ity, tailored to individual or enterprise preferences. For example,a user engaged in a voice interaction might accept an IM interac-tion, but if also using video would prefer to be busy for any otherinteractions to avoid appearing inattentive. The traditional defini-tion of “busy”, which leads to redirection to an assistant or messag-ing system, needs to evolve to take account of multimedia systems.

Intelligent aggregation automates user presence so thatusers don’t have to manually set and update their presence


Fig. 3 A simple, intuitive user interface clearly shows a wealth of aggregated presence information

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Fig. 4 Intelligent rich presence: aggregation, policy and preference filtering

“Rich presence expands the basic set of presencestates, such as active, on-line, off-line, on

the phone, in a meeting, out to lunch, etc… Rich presence states need to be flexibly redefined

to adapt to individual vertical markets or enterpriserequirements, for example, on a customer call,

on the road and working remotely.”


state. The transparent aggregation of presence from all avail-able sources is essential for widespread usage.

Aggregation of presence is also useful when a communica-tion does not have to be answered by a specific individual, butby any member of a group, for example, at a travel agency orin a customer support team. The aggregation of presence infor-mation from several users into group presence might displayinformation such as the current waiting time for service, andeven the skill levels of the available service agents (e.g. 5 min-utes for voice service in English, 8 minutes for voice servicein French, immediately by IM, etc), thus facilitating more effec-tive interaction with the group.

Rich presence information must also be distributed intelli-gently as user and administrator acceptance depends on theimplementation of privacy, security and policy. For example,an administrator might impose security restrictions on the dis-tribution of presence information imposing a presence “fire-wall” to protect the enterprise. An enterprise might imposepresence distribution policies based on hierarchy; a managermight be allowed to view his staff’s presence, while the view-ing of executives’ presence is restricted. An employee con-cerned about privacy might prefer to restrict viewing of his orher presence, but this could be overridden by the employer’srequirements during business hours.

Intelligence is also required in how subscriptions to presencesharing are managed, beyond the current model of mutual con-sent between “buddies”. The mutual consent model is vulner-able to spam: for example, a relentless stream of invitations tobe a buddy of “ACME Hair Replacement” would degrade usersatisfaction with a presence system. Spam detection and con-trol need to be implemented. Alternative subscription modelsmight be better suited to enterprise needs, such as administra-tor-defined distribution groups with appropriately restricted

presence, whether the group includes all the enterpriseemployees, or is a specific work group formed flexibly as needed.

As presence information becomes richer, the ergonomicaspects of the display become vital for user acceptance andusage. Complexity is to be avoided, even though the presencesystem is becoming more sophisticated. Human-like forms oravatars intuitively convey user status. Figure 5 shows a humanicon being used to display aggregated multimedia presence.Furthermore, as intelligence is applied to selectively filter anddistribute presenceinformation to dif-ferent users, thepresence applicationneeds to provideintuitive feedback asto what is being dis-tributed and towhom.

R i c h p r e s e n c eenables media blend-ing in both the setupand interaction phases.Setup is facilitatedby rich presence. Forexample, if rich pres-ence indicates voiceand text capability,the initiator might


“Rich presence information must also be distributedintelligently as user and administrator acceptancedepends on the implementation of privacy, security

and policy.”

� IETF Presence StandardsUnder the umbrella of IETF, the

working group on SIP for Instant Messag-ing and Presence Leveraging Exten-sions (SIMPLE) is focusing on applyingSIP (RFC 3261) to the suite of servicescollectively known as instant messagingand presence. The requirements of apresence infrastructure are defined inRFC 2779, and a presence framework inRFC 2778. A new SIP method, known aspublish, is defined in RFC 3903 forpublishing presence state. The publish

mechanism allows a user to create, mod-ify and remove the user’s state in thepresence server, which manages thepresence state for the user. RFC 3856describes the use of SIP for subscriptionsand presence notifications.

Figure 6 illustrates a simple presencesystem. A presentity (an entity thatprovides presence information that is tobe stored and distributed) registers witha presence server. A watcher subscribesto the presence server to receive the pre-sentity’s presence information. When the

presentity pub-lishes this infor-mation to thepresence servervia a publish

message, theserver notifiesthe watcher via anotify message.

Interoper-ability betweendifferent pres-ence servers isan importantissue addressedin several RFCs,but not yet deployed in practice. RFC3859 defines common semantics anddata formats for presence information,referred to as a Common Profile forPresence (CPP), to facilitate interoper-ability between presence services.Moreover, RFC 3863 defines the Pres-ence Information Data Format (PIDF)as a common presence data format forCPP-compliant presence protocols,

allowing presence information to betransferred across CPP-compliant pro-tocol boundaries without modification.As the presence framework is standard-ized, the applicability of presence isexpanding from being simply an enablerfor instant messaging in first-generationpresence-enabled systems to being arich presence enabler for any commu-nication.

Presentity

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Presentity publishes his presence, Server notifies the Watcher.

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PresenceServer

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Fig. 6 Illustration of presence framework

Fig. 5 Use of a “human icon” to dis-play rich presence information,including multimedia status(voice, IM, video) and evenlocation or time zone

provide a call subject text, such as “Urgent we discuss contracttoday”, to enhance the recipient’s willingness to respond. Fur-thermore, the recipient might provision an away message whichresponds to incoming interaction requests with an appropriate

text message, such as “I’llbe unavailable until 2.00pm.” Alternatively, therecipient might provisiona video clip to be played

to callers who have video display presence. For example, a travelagency could show a clip of the hotel, beach and sunsets at thedestination on promotion this week to customers with on-linePCs who are on-hold waiting to speak to an agent.

Once the interaction has been established, rich presence facil-itates multimedia enhancements, such as text for passing notesbetween participants, application sharing for more efficient col-laboration, and desktop sharing for remote support. It is easierto set up video conferences, as well as to escalate to video basedon mutual capability and the agreement of the participants. Theintegration of all available media (even on different devices) intoa single rich presence view enables participants to escalate (orde-escalate) to the most suitable medium.

� ConclusionSome have referred to presence as the “dial tone of the 21st

century” since it is a pervasive and fundamental part of the emerg-ing communication infrastructure. From the user’s viewpoint,presence will replace the dial tone indication of network avail-

ability by the more pertinent indication of desired user(s) avail-

ability before a communication is initiated.The first instance of this new infrastructure is evident in the

ICS system, which makes it simple for on-line knowledge work-ers to locate one another and communicate by the most suit-able and useful means in order to resolve issues and completework more quickly. By combining on-line presence with tele-phone presence in a simple yet meaningful way, and by inte-grating collaboration tools into the simple phone call experi-ence, users can leverage what they are already doing (IM and

phone calls) to waste less time.ICS makes a measurable differ-ence to the productivity ofusers who are on-line and neara phone by using SIP to realizea seamless, integrated infra-structure that combines thePrivate Branch Exchange(PBX) with on-line communi-cations.

The ICS solution is inte-grated in the Alcatel offering, inparticular in the Alcatel Omni-Touch Unified Communicationsapplication suite. Its powerfulSIP and presence server com-bined with a GUI using the IMmetaphor described earlier arethe main elements of My Team-

work, the conferencing and col-laboration application.

Alcatel is using rich presenceto enhance ICS with presencefrom multiple sources to modelavailability more accurately, andintelligence to address concernsabout privacy, administratorpolicy and security.

Addressing user preferencesrelating to presence distributionis a first step on the road tointelligent communicationagents, which would model therole played by human assistants in managing enterprise commu-nication. Thus “Intelligent Rich Presence” is a key ingredient ofthe future communication infrastructure, integrating the man-agement of multimedia sessions of voice, text, video and appli-cation sharing.


� Reference[1] Ph. Lasserre, D. Kan: “User-Centric Interactions beyond

Communications”, Alcatel Telecommunications Review, 1st Quarter 2005, pp 67-72 (this issue).

Presence: Communicatedstate information such as auser’s availability and capa-bility to communicate.

Instant Messaging (IM)enables users to communi-cate in real-time over theInternet with other on-lineusers; it is analogous to atelephone conversation butusing text-based communica-tion. Typically, small iconicpictures (called ‘emoticons’or ‘smilies’) and HTTP hyper-links can be included in IMas well as plain text.

Collaboration refers to aset of people that are usingtelephones and IP-connectedapplications to performsome task together.Typically, it involves a groupof people who are usingaudio, video, and/or dataconferencing tools to pro-duce a set of finished docu-ments.

“Rich presence enables mediablending in both the setup and

interaction phases.”

� Bibliography[1] RFC 2778: “A Model for Presence and Instant

Messaging”.[2] RFC 2779: “Instant Messaging / Presence Protocol

Requirements”.[3] RFC 3856: “A Presence Event Package for the Session

Initiation Protocol (SIP)”. [4] RFC 3859: “Common Profile for Presence (CPP)”.[5] RFC 3863: “Presence Information Data Format (PIDF)”.[6] Draft-Ietf-Simple-Rpid-04: “RPID: Rich Presence Extensions

to the Presence Information Data Format (PIDF)”.[7] RFC 3903: “Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Extension for

Event State Publication”.[8] RFC 3428: “SIP Extension for Instant Messaging”.

Jack Jachner isSenior Director ofIntelligent RichPresence, one ofAlcatel’s internalventures, in

Plano, Texas, USA.([email protected])

Scott Petrack isDivisional CEO ofthe eDial division ofAlcatel, in Boston,Massachusetts,USA.

([email protected])

Emmanuel Darmois is VicePresident, UnifiedInteractions Man-agement, in theAlcatel Enterprise

Solutions Business Division, inColombes, France.([email protected])

Tim Ozugur isManager of Intelli-gent Rich Pres-ence, one of Alca-tel’s internal ven-tures, in Plano,

Texas, USA.([email protected])



� AbbreviationsDTMF Dual Tone MultiFrequency

GUI Graphical User InterfaceICS Instant Collaboration System

IETF Internet Engineering Task ForceIM Instant MessagingIP Internet Protocol

IRP Intelligent Rich PresencePIDF Presence Information Data Format

RPIDS Rich Presence Extensions to the PIDFSIMPLE SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging

ExtensionsSIP Session Initiation ProtocolUC Unified Communications

VoIP Voice over Internet ProtocolWWW World Wide Web


Alcatel and the Alcatel logo are registered trademarks of Alcatel. All other trademarksare the property of their respective owners. Alcatel assumes no responsibility for theaccuracy of the information presented, which is subject to change without notice.© 03 2005 Alcatel. All rights reserved. 3GQ 00010 0017 TQZZA Ed.01

5B9EA-Alcatel Intelligent Rich Presence-En

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