Presence Information Basics and Beyond

Presence information is all about being aware of what's happening around you, in real-time. This can be as simple as knowing who's in the office or which devices are connected to the network.

Presence information can be used to automate tasks, like sending notifications or messages to people who are available. For example, if someone's status is set to "available" on a communication platform, it can trigger an automated response to a message.

Being able to access presence information from anywhere, at any time, can be super helpful. It can save you time and reduce stress, especially in situations where you need to coordinate with others.

The basics of presence information involve understanding the different types of presence, such as availability, activity, and location.

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Presence information can be published by a user client to show its current communication status.

This status informs others of the user's availability and willingness to communicate, typically through an indicator icon on instant messaging clients.

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Common states on the user's availability include "free for chat", "busy", "away", "do not disturb", and "out to lunch".

These states exist in many variations across different modern instant messaging clients.

Presence attributes can also include user mood, location, or free text status.

The "on-hook" telephone status is an analogy, but it's inexact because it reflects the network's ability to reach the recipient after a conversation is initiated.

Presence shows the availability state before a conversation is initiated, giving the requester a choice to interact with the recipient or use the information for non-interactive purposes.

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Presence information is highly sensitive, and individuals may only want to share it with specific people or during certain times. For example, a worker may only want colleagues to see detailed presence information during office hours.

Having multiple devices connected to presence services can create security concerns. The most common implementations use closed systems, but some vendors have upgraded their services to automatically log out connected clients when a new login request reaches the server from a newly connecting device.

To maintain privacy and anonymity, it's essential to be cautious about who can access your presence information. A presence engine is responsible for providing presence data through various avenues, but this also increases the risk of security breaches.

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Mpop can be automatically inferred from passive observation of a user's actions.

Instant messaging users are familiar with their status being set to "Away" if their computer keyboard is inactive for some time.

This concept can be extended to other devices, such as whether the user's cell phone is on or if they are logged into their computer.

A user's calendar can be checked to see if they are in a meeting or on vacation, and their Mpop status can be used to direct incoming messages across all contributing devices.

For example, "Out of office" might translate to a system directing all messages and calls to the user's cell phone.

The XMPP protocol allows for Mpop by assigning each client a "resource" and a priority number for each resource.

A message directed to the user's ID would go to the resource with highest priority.

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Presence information is highly sensitive, and individuals may want to control who sees it.

For example, a worker may only want colleagues to see detailed presence information during office hours, which is a common practice in instant messaging clients with a "Blocking" facility.

In non-trivial systems, a presentity may define limits to which its presence information may be revealed to different watchers.

To date, most presence systems use closed systems with a Single Point of Presence, where a single device publishes state, but this limits flexibility and cooperation between devices.

This can lead to security issues, such as the need for multiple devices to intercommunicate and handle status information in a way that's compatible with other interoperable presence services.

The lack of openness in these systems can make it difficult to achieve true anonymity from the presence service provider or the presence server.

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Presence information is a game-changer for businesses, allowing employees to see who's available in their corporate network and set up meetings and conference calls on the fly. This eliminates the inefficiency of phone tag or email messaging.

The "Presence Effect" is a phenomenon where employees feel a sense of flow and productivity, similar to being in the office with colleagues. This is in contrast to the "water cooler effect" where productivity increases from casual in-person interactions.

With presence information, employees can be tracked and sent messages about upcoming traffic patterns, saving time and money. This is similar to how a GPS can track a driver's location and provide real-time traffic updates.

Calendar Presence Mapping is a feature that allows administrators to define central presence status for all users. This can be useful for employees who work remotely or have varying schedules.

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Presence information is a game-changer for businesses, allowing employees to instantly see who's available in their corporate network.

This gives more flexibility to set up short-term meetings and conference calls, eliminating the inefficiency of phone tag or email messaging.

Employees feel that instant messaging gives their workdays a sense of "flow", similar to being in the office and able to ask questions of colleagues.

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This phenomenon is called the "Presence Effect", in contrast to the "water cooler" effect, where this level of flow was only thought to be achieved in person.

With presence information, companies can ensure that remote workers are on task and increase productivity.

The "Presence Effect" extends the "water cooler effect" to the entire business, encouraging communication and information exchange.

By seeing who's available, employees can set up meetings and conference calls on the fly, making communication more precise.

Calendar Presence Mapping allows administrators to define centrally for all users which calendar entries automatically generate which presence status.

This feature is especially useful for employees who work remotely from home on certain days.

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SIP is a key technology for real-time communications in business applications.

Presence is a crucial aspect of SIP, enabling users to convey their availability and willingness to communicate in real-time.

A presence service is a system that accepts, stores, and distributes presence information to interested parties, called watchers.

RFC 2778 defines a model and terminology for describing systems that provide presence information.

A presentity is a user who publishes their presence information for willingness to communicate in real-time.

RFC 3856 extends SIP for providing the presence service, while RFC 3857 defines a SIP event package for the watcher.

Presence information conveys the ability and willingness of a user to communicate across a set of devices.

Social awareness is crucial in collaborative gaming, and researchers have developed innovative solutions to enhance user experience. The social presence visualizer transforms social presence information into a user's selected visual abstraction.

This system allows users to perceive social presence through a graphical interface, which can be a game-changer in team-based games. The proposed social presence visualization system is presented in Figure 6, showcasing its functionality.

By visualizing social presence, users can better understand their teammates' and opponents' actions, leading to more effective teamwork and strategy. In a collaborative videogame, this can be a game-changer.

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Intelligent Call Forwarding can greatly enhance productivity by automatically forwarding calls to a designated destination based on the user's presence status. This feature saves time and improves customer satisfaction.

The user can define specific rules for call forwarding, such as forwarding calls to a colleague or the switchboard while voicemail is activated during their absence. This allows for a seamless customer experience, even when the user is unavailable.

Rules for call forwarding can be configured individually and activated with just one click, making it easy to manage and adjust as needed. This convenience is a significant time-saver for users.

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A significant amount of work has been done in the field of presence standardization, with several working groups formed to develop protocols and data formats for presence-related services.

The Instant Message and Presence Protocol (IMPP) working group was formed in 1999 within the Internet Engineering Task Force organization (IETF) to develop protocols for simple presence and instant messaging services.

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Unfortunately, IMPP WG was unable to come to consensus on a single protocol for presence, instead issuing a common profile for presence and instant messaging (CPP) that defined semantics for common services of presence.

The CPP was designed to facilitate the creation of gateways between presence services, making any two CPP-compatible presence protocol suites automatically interoperable.

In 2001, the SIMPLE working group was formed within IETF to develop a suite of CPP-compliant standards for presence and instant messaging applications over the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

SIMPLE specifies extensions to the SIP protocol that deal with a publish and subscribe mechanism for presence information and sending instant messages.

The SIMPLE activity is described in about 30 documents on more than 1,000 pages, making it a complex and detailed standard.

The Wireless Village (WV) initiative was formed in 2001 by Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson to define a set of universal specifications for mobile Instant Messaging and Presence Services (IMPS) and presence services for wireless networks.

The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) was formed in 2002, consolidating the Wireless Village initiative and releasing the first version of the XML-based OMA Instant Messaging and Presence Service (IMPS) in the same year.

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The XMPP or Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol was designed and is currently maintained by the XMPP Standards Foundation, and is used in the commercial implementation of Google Talk and Facebook Chat.

The XMPP working group at IETF published the documents RFC 3920, RFC 3921, RFC 3922, and RFC 3923 in October 2004 to standardize the core XMPP protocol.

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Presence technology has come a long way, enabling various services to leverage presence information in innovative ways.

Presence architecture can be used in fleet management solutions, where vehicles' location information is aggregated with users' presence information to provide real-time updates.

The Connector for Microsoft 365 allows presence information to be collected from Microsoft 365 servers and transferred to users' myApps presence status, ensuring seamless integration with Microsoft Teams.

Standardization efforts have been underway to achieve interoperability between presence protocols, with the Instant Message and Presence Protocol (IMPP) working group issuing a common profile for presence and instant messaging (CPP) in 1999.

The SIMPLE working group developed a suite of CPP-compliant standards for presence and instant messaging applications over the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), specifying extensions for publish and subscribe mechanisms, rich presence document formats, and more.

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The Microsoft 365 Connector is a powerful tool that enables presence information to be collected from the Microsoft 365 server.

This allows for seamless integration with other services, such as Microsoft Teams, where a user's presence status can be automatically updated in real-time.

In a mixed environment with Microsoft Teams, for example, the connection of a user will signal "busy" during an online meeting, preventing incoming calls from disturbing the user.

This feature is particularly useful for remote teams or those working from multiple locations, where presence information can be easily shared across different platforms.

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Presence-based services are being leveraged in various ways, such as fleet management. The fleet management application uses vehicle location information as presence data, obtained through GPS and sent to a presence server.

This data is then aggregated with user presence information, which can be obtained from their cell-phone or other devices. The presence server can automatically redirect calls to the user's current device based on their presence information.

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Presence-based services can be used to forward calls to a user's cell-phone when they move from their desk to the campus. This is done automatically, based on the user's presence information.

The presence architecture can be used to develop fleet management solutions that are efficient and effective. By leveraging presence data, fleet managers can make informed decisions about vehicle deployment and usage.

Presence-based services are being developed and standardized to ensure interoperability between different systems. The Instant Message and Presence Protocol (IMPP) working group was formed to develop protocols and data formats for simple presence and instant messaging services.

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Server performance and benchmarking are crucial for presence systems, especially as the number of users and devices grows.

Presence systems need to be dimensioned to meet the growing number of users and devices.

The SIMPLEStone standard proposes a simple set of metrics for benchmarking presence system performance.

It benchmarks the presence server by generating requests based on a workload specification.

Server capacity is measured in terms of request handling capacity, as an aggregate of all types of requests and individual request types.

This helps ensure that presence systems can handle the varying number of devices as presence sources and the rate at which they update presence information.

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Presence information can be displayed in various formats, including text, images, and audio notifications.

The type of presence information displayed can be customized to suit individual preferences.

Users can choose to display their availability status as online, busy, or away.

A presence indicator can be placed on a user's profile or contact card for easy reference.

Customizable presence settings allow users to tailor their presence information to different groups or contexts.

Some systems allow users to set a default presence status for when they are not actively using the system.

A user's presence status can be updated automatically when they log in or out of the system.

System Performance and Integration is crucial for presence information systems to handle growing user bases and varying device updates.

To ensure presence systems meet user demands, they need to be dimensioned accordingly.

The Presence Server Performance and Benchmarking Standard, SIMPLEstone, proposes a simple set of metrics for benchmarking presence system performance based on SIMPLE.

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SIMPLEstone benchmarks the presence server by generating requests based on a workload specification.

Server capacity can be measured in terms of request handling capacity as an aggregate of all types of requests as well as individual request types.

This means that presence systems need to be able to handle a large number of requests from various devices and users.

A well-dimensioned presence system can ensure that users receive accurate and up-to-date presence information.

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