Transcript

Olle Johannsson: Hello, I’m Olle Johansson. That used to be me or the man my wife married a long time ago, but I wanted to give this an executive front page with all the titles, you know, a one person company I can assign all titles to myself including cleaner or waste carrier or whatever.

How many of you are actually here and now? Hands up. [background mumbles]

Okay, most of you. Thanks

How many of you are not in the office. Hands up. [background mumbles]

We have a Presence conflict.

For me you’re here, but for other people you are not in the office. You’re available and not available at the same time. Interesting.

Try to set that state in any present system.

We’re going to talk Presence—an open unified communication, or a bit more. The future of Presence.

A few random thoughts, my view of things…

I’ve been working for quite some time for with blinking lamps and Asterisk, with Jabber , “MSN”,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN other technologies. During the fall I was a project leader for a large project in Portugal where we installed SIP and Jabber for all the students of all the universities

Which was kind of interesting. We also had a lab at [unintelligible] in Paris, where a couple of open source developers met and investigated SIMPLE and Jabber and interoperability of SIMPLE and Jabber and what to do, and I mentioned part of that program

So let’s see where this takes us.

Like unified communication, Presence is a big buzzword of today.

Let’s see what it really is because it means different things to different people.

One thing is for sure, that Presence will drive a lot of communication.

It already happens.

If I connect to FaceBook on my iPhone, I’m not surprised anymore if my sister in Mexico suddenly starts chatting over FaceBook to my iPhone. At first I’m surprised, I said, “well, what’s happening, someone is disturbing me.”

But They enabled chat in the FaceBook iPhone application. So we started communicating. After that we set up a Skype call and it started with Presence. We live in different time zones she saw that I was available, I saw she being available, and we talked.

So the first question really here about Presence, what it is, is “where are you?

Are you available? or not available?

That information is real important for communication with other beings but it might also control your PBX. If you set your Presence in Jabber or FaceBook or something else to “not available” should a phone try calling you. Should a PBX direct your calls to voicemail or something else

Another thing that’s coming rapidly is of course location. Where are you? How many here have looked at [brightkite?]? It’s kind of an interesting tool, especially when you combine it with twitter and other things, you’ll actually have Geolocation and Presence.

So location might be which room, which office, or might be [unintelligible] coordinates if you want to expose all that.

Or like me I’m just saying time zone and closest city in MSN Jabber so people know a little bit about where I am. It might not be that hard, but where you are—well, that’s interesting

I remember the change that we’ve gone through in telephoning during the last 20 years.

When I was a kid, every phone call started with, “Hello, is Hans there? Anna there?”

They ask for someone; they ask for the person.

Now when I get a phone call, the first question is, “Hello, Olle, where are you?”

They know that it’s me, the phone has become personal, but they want to know where I am. Communication.

Then we have Presence systems delivering small information pieces. I tend to call them uplets—small short updates.

What’s going on in your brain right now? Everything thing from, “Oh, I just had a bad hamburger.” Oh very interesting to hear that one in the middle of the night from my friend in America.

Or Thinking about how to connect [unintelligible] with Adobe Acrobat in a printer, but information uplets, Part of the emerging Presence system.

Another thing we want to do is connect. I see your Presence and availability. I can probably also query about your capabilities. Can I connect over text, audio, maybe video? Ooh, isn’t that cool? In Skype you see little icons [unintelligible] in Mac you see icons about capability.

Can we connect with applications, work together, [wide] port applications, sharing stuff, supporting? Presence will drive that too.

And of course, where you’re heading. Then we’re coming back to asterisk.

What’s the status of your phone? And will the phone status affect your personal Presence. That’s interesting. And with new Asterisk modules, we can also integrate directly with calendaring systems. Are you supposed to be available?

And of course if this is an emergency call from my wife, I want to bypass a lot of this stuff with that I’m not available I don’t want any calls, all calls to voicemail stuff. I want that call to go through so I can help her boot her computer that didn’t boot or whatever the emergency was.

But for other people, I might want to stop everything saying, “Hey, I’m talking in Germany.”

Communicating with bots. Large part of asterisk work is creating IBRs. That’s a bot. We now have Jabber [unintelligible] and we have IRC, we’re working in IRC, we have bots there that assist us in the help. If someone mentions a bug report, we can query about it. Someone asks the same question that everyone else has been asking in the last 24 hours. We have bots that produce a reference to an author’s book [about] it. Right now it’s your book; it might be another book. [mumble] So communicating with bots, interesting part of this process.

And we want to do it on multiple devices. We have the laptop. We have the phone—the desktop phone. We have the cell phone. Might be the car, delivering information to your Presence system. [Or] travel Presences systems.

Might be something very, very different. Presence is not only for persons. Might be between services, devices, other things.

This would be really, really simple if we had one platform; like we have one email system, but that’s not the way it works today. We have way too many systems, and it’s hard to manage them all, so what you end up with on my desktop I have Pigeon or Adium,

With all these Presence systems to at least make it possible for me to have the same status in all systems I connect to. Because I can’t really pick with my friends saying, “You have to connect with this protocol, the Edvina protocol in order to get my Presence!” Of course, they have all their friends on FaceBook and they use FaceBook chat for Presence, or they have all their friends in something else, LiveJournal, or whatever.

So we need interoperability and this shows me that the market is still immature.

When I started working with email, the email gateways was where you earned money commercially. We sold X400 to CC mail to MS mail to internet mail gateways. And hopefully they would preserve at least one out of the three [Swedish characters?] we have, but not all of them.

And now look at all this stuff. We got to do something here. But this shows that all the things that’s happening, there’s a lot of innovation in that space, on that front.

So if you all agree with me on that description of Presence, let’s look at some of the problematic areas that I personally see with the systems I have today.

Sometimes, (that’s another more up-to-date picture of me, without the glasses) sometimes I want to hide. I mean, I’m in my office rarely during some periods. During may I will be in the office probably three days. I need to get work done. People want bills to be paid and other things, so I want to hide, but maybe not for everyone. There’s my kids, they’re on MSN, and some relatives, and stuff, but all business contacts, I want to hide from.

How can I do that? How can I manage separate groups and hide for some of them in a nice way. Not many systems give me that availability. In Jabber, I can turn on something called “Invisible,” meaning I see others, but they won’t see me, but that applies to everyone.

I need to set up multiple accounts in order to manage different Presence in most Jabber clients. The protocol allows me to set different Presence, so every time I send Presence to Stefan, I can say. “Extremely busy working with AMOOCON promotion.” But the rest of you will that I’m not writing any slides for AMOOCON and forgotten all about it, haven’t booked any tickets.

But he will see a special Presence.

I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of schizophrenic. I have multiple personas.

So my uplets, well, for business contacts I want to say something, “Oh, I’m very involved in business and I’m extremely successful and I look exactly as I did when I married still. Suit and tie.”

But for my friends, I might want to say, “Oh, I’m enjoying spending all week in the garden, tending my fuchsias and dahlias and all other flowers, and I’m totally avoiding work. I’ve no interest in work at all because the winter in Sweden is gone and it’s spring, and it’s beautiful.”

So I want to have these multiple personas and I want to say something cool to my asterisk development buddies, “Redesigning [ ] SIP to support some mysterious protocol that no one ever heard of. SIPX.

But how do I do that in Adium, whatever application I have to manage.

And I really get tired of confirming that I’m friends with Stefan Wintermeyer.

LinkedIn , FaceBook, ICQ , Plaxo, [Sport] LinkedIn. I get the invitation of all kind of strange systems, confirming these same people, over and over and over again

It’s public knowledge that I actually have some kind of relation with Kevin P. Fleming, so why should I have to confirm it. Maybe he feels happy and more secure if I confirm it now and then? “Oh, I’ve got a friend! I’ve got a friend! I’ve got a friend!” What’s the missing piece here. An open standard.

Why should I have to map this over and over again. Why can’t I reassign a global attribute?

I have Attributes in FaceBook, Asterisk buddies, personal friends, someone else’s friends. But I can’t use those in other protocols, in other systems. That’s weird.

Have you tried updating your address book from all these systems. I think you have five Randy Resnicks because if I’m schizophrenic with two personalities, there you have a man with so many personalities and email addresses and stuff, so you can’t keep track of them.

We need some system here, some solution. And my Jabber client is kind of lousy, because every time I try to add a contact, it assumes I want Presence. All the people I want to communicate with them, I want to check Presence before I start communication. But I don’t want my screen to blink, blink, blink, blink every time someone comes online or goes offline. I’m not really interested. The people I work with on a daily basis in a project right now, yes, I want to know when they’re online so I can start working with them, communicating, but other than that…

But they just want to have red/green, red/green. Someone came online, they have a flaky network red/green, red/green, red/green, red/green all day. I don’t like that.

Okay, those are my personal problems, I’m happy that you accepted me sharing them with you. Let’s move on to some more boring slides. We’re going to describe Jabber protocol on XML basis. Okay, let’s get that.

When designing the systems, we need to separate persons and bots, because you have to remember that there’s a lot of stuff here that you want to connect to the Presence platform that you’re going to run, regardless if you outsource it or not. There’s one problem with the cell phone network, if you look at Presence systems, is that if I connect to Jabber over 3g with 200 friends (yeah, I’m exaggerating, but I want you to feel that I’m a popular guy, so with 500 friends), this phone will have batteries that last for 20 minutes because the Presence updates, not that I’m communicating, the Presence update SIMPLE to wire forces the phone to never go into battery save mode. The antenna, the radio will be on full power all the time.

So good clients, they implement a proprietary protocol and aggregate all that information on the network side, so that when I actually take the phone [unintelligible] application or actually show it on screen, they ask for the most recent Presence state for the buddies that are on the screen. And I get all this traffic for a short while, I chat, and then I kind of turn the screen off and it goes off line.

But those clients assume that I gave them my personal account information, and I have no idea what kind of company they are running the service. I have no idea what they’re going to do with my personal account information. I don’t want to give them that.

I want to assign them a subaccount for that kind of service that I can disable at will. James Bond, kill at will [imitates gun sound], “Don’t like you anymore.” And that goes for my car, alarm systems, answer-my-mother service that holds my Presence for my mom. Yes, yes, that’s fine, that’s fine, yes, yes, I mean, you know, a good chat bot.

We need some kind of delegation system here to handle different personas. I was at the Jabber [unintelligible] in [Brussels] a month ago and there’s actually a Jabber standard draft out taking care of this.

But let’s step back then and look at what we’re trying to create here. We have protocols like SIP and Jabber, and other things, that manage Presence, that manage setting up from communication sessions between two, three, four, multiple parties, that can actually, by design, handle setting up sessions of almost any kind. Games, whatever. Use your imagination.

But right now we have too many different protocols. We want to create one internet platform, like email, like the web, to really make this happen. Because right now it’s all test systems, It’s separated islands, and it’s very hard to manage for everyone that wants to get involved. I don’t think normal users would like to have the 15 different accounts I have to distribute uplets, Presence, connect to friends… I don’t think it’s even 15, probably much more than that.

And if we want to take this infinite technology into an enterprise, say, that well, the next generation of employees will assume that they can use chat systems and Presence systems to connect to business colleagues and friends. It already happened that I did business with one of the main manufacturers of SIP soft [funds], immediately got a connection request on MSN, from a private MSN handle, from a sales guy. Outside of control of the company. And Of course he left the company but he still had me in his MSN buddy list. So how does this work with enterprise communication rules, “Oh we’re not allowing any instant messaging or chat in the company.” Well, you won’t get any employees. They’ll think you’re boring and leave the company, or they will run the chat from the cell phone and you can’t stop that.

So will it be possible to enforce a policy here? Don’t think so. That also means that since everything goes over [port 80 in] the firewall and the rest over the cell phone if you try to block the rest, your firewall is no longer working. You have to start thinking about new concepts, new ways, setting up communication over a secure channel on top of all this stuff.

So the personal requirement has to be handled by the enterprise and you have to start thinking about how to use this and leverage on this to expand your business.

Let’s go into a fun area. Protocol wars. The SIP dream.

SIP is 10 years old. it has been used to produce a lot of printed paper. The idea was to design a new communication platform. A realtime system that didn’t really match the current [ ] because the authors of the first drafts said, “The current [ ] works and the cost of running it just goes down so we should create something new.” H 3-3 was p stem over IP so it exists, it works, fine.

So they have this grand vision. And it doesn’t really happen. SIP is used for telephone. Video, audio, and that’s it. On some isolated islands you see Presence instant messaging with SIP, but it’s not really taking off.

For release, after release, after release of Pigeon and Adium, they’re both based on the same library—purple—the SIMPLE support is just a piece of shit and no one bothers. I filed my report for every new release, it doesn’t get resolved. No one cares.

So that shows that, well, we have a problem, SIMPLE is not simple. Instant messaging and Presence in SIP is complicated. It’s built for carriers. Will that be the protocol that we all use? No.

Another IETF protocol is Jabber, or an IETF named XMPP , Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. If you go to a SIP SIMPLE meeting, you’ll find all the carriers fighting about services you never want to use. If you go to a Jabber developers meeting, all the cool dudes are there. They’ve been in really, really cool labs. They’re not thinking, “Oh, I see you in Presence.” Take Dirk Meyer. Dirk is building a video content distribution system, connecting set top boxes over Jabber. He wants to place certificates in a set top box, so when I visit you, your set top box can go to my set top box through the connection down in Jabber, and play the video and control my set top box to tape a TV channel, or something else. So it’s not Presence and instant messaging as you think of it, but it’s using the internet platform to create new cool applications. It’s burning across firewalls, [nads or gnats] all that, by using Jabber. And there’s many, many different applications.

SAPO, the Portuguese Telecom’s [unintelligible] section have a large messaging and Presence system, called SAPO Messenger. No user really understands that this is all run in Jabber. It doesn’t say Jabber. It doesn’t say it’s a PP, and they’re connecting a lot of bots to it.

The problem is if you follow these standards groups, they’re duplicating work. They’re not listening to each other. It’s not [ ] policy. The Jabber people are working on setting up audio sessions across [nads or gnats]. Guess what. We’ve been doing that in SIP for years. The Jabber folks have been working for quite some time with end-to-end secure sessions. Suddenly the SIP folks come up with MSRP. Okay. Interesting.

And when we worked for one week at [unintelligible] in France, we realized that it’s going to be extremely hard building gateways between Jabber and SIMPLE. We have some of that working now in Kamailio open SIP’s family of SIP servers, but it still requires a lot of stuff to work properly. You can do the basic stuff. You can send asterisk messages across and you’ll probably get some Presence. But the architecture is really, really different, even though [Diatech] tried to make it compatible by requiring them both to follow a common platform standard.

So there needs to be more work here because we’re going to live with both SIP and SIMPLE, and XMPP Jabber Presence in instant messaging and the network, as well as other systems.

But I might be too old and too ITF-centric and too traditional. I wish I was the young boy in the picture again, because then I would say, “Jabber, SIP, XMPP? What?!”

These are the new platforms—FaceBook, Twitter , Laconica. Might be that SIP and Jabber is a dead end. This is where the cool stuff happens!

Now people are creating Jabber solutions [ ] but it’s Jabber, of course. Jabber has a wonderful system that scales, is distributed like email and web, and other things,, for handing subscriptions of anything, RSFPs, uplets, status of my set top box, whether Kevin had a Dr Pepper today or not. That’s information I want to speak with it. Without Dr Pepper, I’m [cautious].

So I might be on the wrong track when I say, “SIP and SIMPLE need to work.” This is probably where I need to go.

The asterisk integration into Skype, while I don’t like Skype for not being open standard, might be the coolest thing that has happened since we added Jabber integration. Now we have Jabber, and Skype and [don’t think telephone alone?]. Skype Presence, we have Skype integration, we can open up a Skype network…Oh, that’s sexy.

And when we’re talking about, not the personal stuff, Skype, pigeon, msn client, we’re talking about all these bots which are going to deliver information. Imagine all cars delivering your information over GSN network, so someone can actually see traffic congestion by using Presence, and then send uplets, I mean, twitter messages through GPS systems to redirect you.

Imaging a lot of systems sending updates in your name automatically, and this information is aggregated, handled, responded to, by different systems. Oh, it’s cool. It’s 1984, privacy, hmm.

We need to really think about stuff like this for the present systems. Most people using FaceBook outside of the techy nerd crowd, don’t understand that when they write a personal message on someone’s wall, everyone can see it. They don’t understand privacy integrity. I’ve seen messages there that were clearly not for public use.

Okay, let’s go into Asterisk for a while. Asterisk and Presence is kind of interesting. It started a long time ago with some code for a [ ] phone, and it might have been working, might not, but I didn’t bother much with it. [mumbles about getting to next slide]

So at some point in time I a huge investment, extremely, I bought Ibeam, 65 Canadian dollars. And Ibeam had SIMPLE. Of course I needed to have SIMPLE and asterisk, so I added that. [Luke] had the blinking lamp system and added other things. And other people started seeing this and contributing code—that’s what happens in open source—someone starts and other people join in and they test, and suddenly we were a large team working with this. A lot of things have happened. In Asterisk 1.2, we actually had a lot of new stuff in there that worked more reliably if you managed it properly.

In 1.4, we added an internal devicestate system called Metermaids, for watching over parking lots, so that meant that we could actually extend the system to look at other things than just calls and phones. And Russell added extensionstate and devicestate system on top of that, so you can now, in your dialplan affect states of anything. You can add external applications affecting states. You can take in FaceBook status, twitter status, French; Is your car at home; is your alarm ringing; is your door phone ringing. You can have anything force a blinking lamp or an [ ] message in asterisk. Asterisk can distribute Presence states. The states we define internally. It’s just a couple of states that we have for the actual devices, but as long as the blink lamps do what you want, you can redefine them for anything.

So in Asterisk 1.4, we added parking lots, the SLA system and Meetme support, we have some [back ports] of extensionstate and devicestate functions for 1.4, but in 1.6 we added that in the release. We also have, as Mark said, an experimental version of a distributed state. We now have redefined a lot of this work, based on experience from 1.2 and 1.4. We looked at how we distribute events internally in Asterisk, and externally. So we now have an internal event system, and Russell created that and started with changing the way voice mail works, so voice mail is actually event-driven. It’s not like we’re going out every tenth minute checking your hard disk drive for all your accounts, saying, “Oh, did something happen here?”

We actually have an event. When someone leaves a voicemail, an event is passed through asterisk through the channel that turns on a blinking message waiting lamp or something else. We are extending that now to the various states and Russell made an implementation that we are still discussing how it works, but it’s experimental. We need to find out how to do this. But, with this application, the open IAS platform, you can distribute events and Presence across systems. Actually it works. Other people are using this in production, but we marked it experimental because we might change the APIs and interfaces. We had a lot of discussions about other usages of the event systems during the developer meeting we’ve been having here in [ ] over the weekend.

So what you’ll see is that in coming releases we’ll have a clustered event system in asterisk which will be extremely powerful, not only for blinking lamps and phones, but you can use it for a lot of other things—[ queue] states, staff availability. Think about it. Come on.

So that’s blinking lamps. If you look at Presence and instant messaging in 1.4, we added Google Talk! and Jabber support. Unfortunately, Google Talk! wasn’t really what came out of the Jabber standard process. The Jabber standard process ended up with something called jingle for a while we had interoperability issues there.

But Jingle prevails and a lot of things are happening in Jingle. If you listen to Deanna from [ ]she’s been doing a lot of work with jingle. She’s been involved in the standard process and used that for call centers, instead of using SIP or [ITS] or something, she used jingle and Jabber to manage the whole call center. Very impressive.

So Asterisk 1.4 can either run as a Jabber component connecting to another Jabber server and extending the mainspace used in the episerver or as a stand alone XMPP server.

In asterisk 1.6.0 we added something else called Realtime text. We started using the text frames in asterisk in a new way—to support people with hearing disabilities or deaf people, so they can actually have text phones. I’ve been working with a group in Sweden who have video and text phones like [the old Germans talk], for the old guys, character by character text, and when we did that, we also made it possible to place calls through asterisk without voice. Of course for these people, voice is just a waste of bandwith, so we removed that. If you have a problem with one-way voice for your calls, you can remove the other call leg and use text instead. That’s fine.

Asterisk 1.6-something, calendar integration, real important. I don’t know if that model Terry wrote is available 1.4 as well. He’s been working with it for a long time. I think it’s only 1.6, or actually in a separate branch right now. And of course, the commercial, kind of add-on Skype integration is really, really interesting here that we run both in 1.4 and 1.6.

And Mark mentioned, but we really haven’t started working on that, the multi-protocol Presence what can we do with Asterisk in the Presence and instant messaging world? Is it real Asterisk? A while ago, we decided this is not Asterisk, but asterisk needs to connect to these systems. So we don’t really know, we’re not sure that was the proper decision. We’ll see where we go from here, but the way Asterisk is positioned right now in telephony, we’re a multi-protocol kind of Esperanto. We handle it all. If you look at the map I had of all the Presence and instant messaging systems, we need an Asterisk there as well.

And remember now that Mark, before he ended up in Asterisk projects, he was an active developer of games, but ended up being Pigeon and Purple, so we’re coming back. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. We need something there as well. It might be Asterisk. It might be something else.

In Kamailio, the new name for OpenSER , there’s a lot things happening as well. Kamailio has been having a kind of, and SER the first version of this family of products, has had a Jabber integration module for quite some time that was, to say “experimental” would be kind. Now Daniel added a new Jabber integration module that works as a complement or standalone server, and actually does a lot of these SIP SIMPLE conversion [unintelligible]. We have a new Presence framework, so we have a basic Presence framework and we add modules to it for different protocols. We have SIMPLE, we have Dialog-info, which means blinking lamps for calls. All of these modules are fairly new, but we really want you to run them, test them, and give us your feedback so we can improve them.

These modules and Asterisk were really the core of what we were working with, in addition to some commercial products at interoperability week in Paris.

So, where do we go from here?

Well, stop being boring. Stop looking at the old applications. Because they’re out there. MSN and all that stuff is out there. We need to look at new things. We need to forget telephony, forget IM as you know it today. We need to look at the bits and pieces and think, “How can this support my business? How can this support my application?” or “How can I create a new sexy FaceBook with 50 million accounts in a week?”

Well, whatever you want, but try thinking in new ways here. Look at what’s out there. Jabber has expanded for publication of moods. I’ve been able to change my mood once using old Jabber. I can’t remember or figure out how I did that, so I keep having the same mood for years in my Jabber server. Probably need to reinstall my Jabber server to get rid of that.

But looking at the model, there’s something new building here and you see a lot of work in the green layer now that is really, really cool. If you look at the one laptop [unintelligible] project, they’re using Jabber in a very cool way, with Zeroconf, alias Apple Bonjour, to automatically discover people in your neighborhood and to show up on your buddy list, all using Jabber. And they have new applications, new APIs, to build new kind of information pipes to distribute information between these entities.

There’s a lot of cool stuff there. And don’t forget the old stuff to store and forward content—email, web servers, they still have a role to play. But they’re just one part of the solution.

So, this is all very confusing. Should you remove all your Jabber and MSN clients? No. Look at them in another way. Where do we go from here. We have protocol wars, interoperability wars. There’s a lot of room for working on cool stuff.

So what do we need to do? We need to find a perfect balance. We need to untie all these knots and happily sail away to the horizon to the sunset. Be impressive. Wow!

Keep that feeling for a while.

My way of looking at this is that open standards wins. The rest is just inspiration. When I start to work on the email, everyone said, “Microsoft mail wins. CC Mail is the global standard. X400 will kill you.”

Anyone using CC Mail here? MS Mail? No.

Interoperability is what drives this stuff. That’s why we have the Jabber.com , the SIP IT tests, other tests. We need interoperability. We need things to work together to build the framework.

And there’s a lot of cool stuff happening that I didn’t have time to mention here—[authentication] space with open ID, and all those technologies, so I don’t have to have a gazillion accounts, I can have a few accounts. One per personality. What luck for Randy.

When you build platforms, always, always add an API. Always publish the API. Make it freely available. Because even though I think I’m the coolest guy on earth, there are much more cool guys out there. Look at Saul, for instance. He’s much more cool. Or Jay Philips. If you give them the stuff they need to create the cool applications that use your stuff, your stuff will benefit from it and together you can create the applications with usage you really want.

Building new things, new services, without APIs is a dead end today. Integration, interoperability, open standards, that’s where we need to go.

Any questions?

Olle: Yes

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yeah, they changed the name frequently for it. Live Communication Server, Office Live Communication Server, something. Yeah and Cisco is pushing their stuff. The good thing with the Microsoft server is that they prove the SIP vision. They have audio communication, Presence, instant messaging, video, and if you go through the menus, you’ll find a dial pad for old fashioned telephony, but it’s not easy to find. And they have application sharing. They have a lot of cool things and they’re all using SIP—with some enhancements that you can’t look at unless you sign a non-disclosure agreement, which means that we can’t implement it. So they’re doing the Microsoft thing again. And you, as customers, you have the power to force them back and say, “This is all very cool. It’s a sexy application. I love it, but, guys, you’ve got to follow the open standards and play the open game. Look what happened with MS Mail. Remember that. It died. You were forced to use internet email. So, yeah, it exists. It’s out there, but it’s not going to be the solution.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Install a Jabber server. Download Jabber clients. Build applications. They’re so many libraries out there so you can build bots, applications, that use Jabber. Maybe not for personal computers communication. Jabber is a really cool message box. For Asterisk, I’ve been looking to importing Manager over Jabber, and some other people have been doing that as well, so we had a discussion about that. But right now, I’m heading down the Jabber path because we have integration to all kinds of cool stuff. And the cool dudes are there, so I want to be with them. So, install a Jabber server. Install Jabber clients. Or if you can’t install a server, register an account, in Jabber.org you register accounts, with any Jabber client. Start looking into it.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Might be a dead end tomorrow.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Well, the question is do we want Asterisk to be a full-fledged Jabber server? I think it’s better to run it as a component, but we still need to support the Jabber [publish inscribe?] for Presence, and now with the new event-driven system, that module can be upgraded. We just need someone that either gives us money to develop it or takes the time to develop it. It’s open source. It’s all there.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: The Jabber integrated Asterisk is really cool. It will improve.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: [Matt]

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: That’s a good question. I think we need to give that input to Process One in Paris and you will have one in a few days.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: I don’t think, Process One have an iPhone Jabber client, and I don’t think it’s [run] in Presence.

It should.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yep.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Well, depending on your agreement with the phone company, there’re external services now where you can add, either you get it from the phone company or use external service to get it by scripting in asterisk or a Jabber server. So you get the cell phone communication based on towers and masts and stuff.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Privacy wall. No way for sales people.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yeah, but all sales people might not have iPhones, so… The other way is to get into [unintelligible] locations.

Mr. X:* [unintelligible]

Olle: Sorry?

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yes.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yep.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yep.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Oh, yeah. But I might still have different sectors of that global system. The different permissions. It’s all about authentication/authorization. So it still might be one system, even though I sector it off and say, “Oh, I’m so happy dressing in women’s clothes for this group, but not that group.”

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yes, and the Jabber protocol actually allows for that. The client’s doesn’t support it.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yep. Yep. I think it’s still there in some of the protocols, but the clients have kind of simplified it. They’re all gone down the ICQ/MSN way. In the Jabber protocol, if you fire up PSI, which is one of the most technically advanced Jabber clients, you will see that each, if you connect to me, each of my devices will show up, and each device will have a different state, okay, and some devices might not show up, so I’m not available on them. And your Jabber client actually gets that, I’m not available in my car, I’m not available here, but I’m available at home and it says, “Green, all available.”

Now if you’re a business connection, you might say, or you’re looking for connecting to my car, you would like it to be red, so the protocol has much more operations, but the clients are multiprotocol and they try to aggravate, and….

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yeah, this is an interesting problem with phones. Like the [ ] phones and other phones have a DND button. If I press that, it might mean that I am in a meeting, I, Olle, am not available at all. It might also mean that this phone is disabled, so you have to reach me on other phones, but I’m still available.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yeah, I mean, pressing the DND button can have a different meaning for different people, and if you say that, okay, Asterisk has phone states. If I’m talking on the phone, Asterisk says I’m busy, if the [hint] is configured for my three phones and I’m talking on one, the extension is busy. Now, I’m single-tasking, but several other people are multi-tasking, so even if they’re talking on one phone, they might want to be available in Jabber for chat or even more phone calls. So a lot of these are personal profiles, as well, that we need to handle when we aggregate information from different devices. So all of these systems are very immature. There’s a lot of development, a lot of cool stuff to do here, in order to support applications to support people in work life and personal life. The game isn’t over. It’s a lot of fun.

Olle: Yes.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yep.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Well, Asterisk has call states, basically, looking if your phone is ringing, if it’s on hold, or if it’s busy, you’re talking. In addition to that, the phone can actually, when you press the DND key, if you’re talking about the [Sloan], you can do a lot of actions, you can have the Sloan phone go to a website and report your DND status and turn other things off, and make sure your Jabber account is off as well, and do other things. So, yes, there are multiple states if you want to talk about a phone and how it contributes to your Presence information.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Oh, yeah.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yep.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: That’s why we have the Kamailio model that Terry Wilson has been writing. But it’s still very personal, how you want to handle this. Some people say that, yes, I have all these meetings in my calendar, but I want to control whether or not I answer my phone personally, so when I’m in a meeting in my calendar I forward all calls to my cell phone.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: And you can’t do it in Version 7, yet.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: Yeah, the Legacy’s … yep… but then you’re back in the phone world, the phone world…. [unintelligible] might [give a pointer to your ion], and you’ll find yourself, but that’s only one of the Discovery systems, so that works.

Man: [unintelligible]

Olle: You’re next? Sorry. I can continue talking, but we have to switch computers and [unintelligible] are here…",