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Abstract
This paper takes a look at the Presence service and explores its meaning and usefulness from a layman's perspective. It explores how the service is useful for the users and how is it different from other similar services that are available today. |
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Presence Applications and Standards Bodies
| Use of Presence Service Presence service can be used by various users or applications for various purposes, some of which are presented below: Presence for publishing Availability Presence facilitates a better control over means of communication for a user. It lets a user indicate how, when and by whom, he or she can be contacted. The other party gets the appropriate status on his or her presence enabled service, thus enabling a more effective communication. A Presence user can set different profiles showing different availability status to different contacts or a group of contacts for a specific services or a device etc. A user can also set up a Block List, i.e. a list of users, companies or applications, who can never view their availability status. Presence as a Personalization Tool Presence is also a powerful tool for personalization and self-expression. It includes rich forms of expression, including images and text, enabling a user share a wide range of personal information like location, moods, emotions etc. Basically it lets a user share anything and everything that might be relevant to the other party and that a user is willing to share. Presence as an Advertising Tool Presence can also be used by Companies and applications as an advertisement channel. New product launches can be advertised through Presence. Latest price offers, attractive discount schemes etc. can be advertised through Presence. A restaurant may publish the specialty of the day, a bank can publish financial information, a news channel may publish current hot topics etc. All that these entities need to do is to subscribe to the presence service and then publish the relevant information through appropriate visual images and/or text messages. |
| Standardization Bodies No service can penetrate deep and wide into consumer community, if there are no common standards for its development and usage. Today, a telecom vendor, say Nokia, can come up with a world class Presence server, define the most optimized protocol for sharing a user's availability across various nodes, but it cannot gain a good public acceptability unless it enables sharing of that information across an Ericsson Mobile phone or a Cisco PDA. Similarly, an operator, say Airtel, cannot have a successful launch of Presence service, unless it enables its subscribers to view availability of their contacts who might be using a Hutch subscription. Hence, any product or service, no matter how attractive or useful it is on its own, needs a common platform, a common interface, so that other similar products and services can talk to it and operate together to create a rich user experience.
So, who defines standards for Presence Service? Following bodies have been involved in setting the standards for Presence service at various stages Wireless Village: Founded by Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia in April 2001. Has a group called IMPS, that worked on Presence and Instant Messaging among other things. The aim was to make these services interoperable. However, it has a limited acceptability, due to fewer members. The group was later merged into OMA Open Mobile Alliance was started in June 2002, with the aim of facilitating global adoption of mobile data services by defining interoperable service enablers. In October 2002, Wireless Village was consolidated into OMA, and a workgroup, called IMPS (Instant Messaging and Presence Services) was formed. This workgroup defines specifications for IMPS services, as well as procedures and tools for testing conformance and interoperability. Today, this workgroup has been divided into two separate work groups: OMA Presence and Availability WG, and OMA Messaging services WG 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) defines protocols and standards for Third Generation networks and services. It SA (Service Architecture) workgroup has defined a presence reference architecture in both - 'network layer' as well as 'application layer', thus providing end-to-end presence information flows. The term "network layer" refers to the communication that is required between the Presence Service functional elements (e.g. Presence Server) and various network elements as they are defined in the 3GPP network architecture (e.g. MSC, HLR). The term "application layer" refers to the communication that is required between the various Presence Service elements (e.g. Presence Server and Presence Source), which includes the "application layer" functional entities. IETF has a SIMPLE (SIP Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging) workgroup, which defines protocols and formats used in presence service. E.g. SIP extensions, RFC 3856. |
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