Availability

"Slick". That’s what I said when I powered up the Polycom phone that the folks at Junction Networks sent me in order to be able to review their new My.Onsip user interface. Truly plug-and-play, the phone immediately found the Junction Networks hosted PBX, configured itself (even through my NAT and Firewall), and was ready to go in a few seconds.

As cool as it was, however, I wasn’t as interested in how easy the phone was to configure as I was in the GUI that Junction Networks announced last week. Web based, my.Onsip shows presence information for everyone in your organization, incorporates XMPP-based chat, and allows dialing from either the on-screen GUI, or the phone. You can see a photograph below (credit Lonnie Lazar’s review at Voxilla). On the left you see presence and availability information for people in your organization, and on the lower right, tabs for messaging.

So why is this so compelling? Fact: over 80% of calls end in a voice mail box today. If business can find a way to deal with telephone tag, they can boost productivity everywhere in the organization. Simply knowing the availability of the people you need to reach will help immensely. Moreover, Junction Networks has gotten the interaction model right. Today’s business phone user uses IM first, to establish that the other party is available to talk, followed by a voice conversation if necessary.

Now all they need is a mobile version for my iPhone or Blackberry.

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Jean-Louis Seguineau has written a useful taxonomy of presence and awareness this morning.Â He breaks awareness up into four categories:

availability awareness, which relates to the availability of people and objects.
contextual awareness, which includes physical, social and mental context.
group awareness, which promotes the feeling of belonging to a group.
workplace awareness, which is knowledge of tasks within the virtual environment.

And then provides two definitions of presence:

the degree of perception of the other person in a mediated communication and the consequent perception of their interpersonal interaction.

and

a temporary judgment of the nature of interaction with the other, as limited or augmented by the medium.

Today’s presence systems are about little more than availability awareness, and perhaps that’s the biggest problem with them. Far from being useful mediators in communications, they are in fact more intrusive than valuable.Â

That is, in fact, the problem we set out to solve with iotum.Â

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