Presence and IntComm WG

[Deke Kassabian <>]

--On Wednesday, February 4, 2004 2:04 PM -0500 Jeremy George 
<> wrote:

>   JointTechs was something of a milestone for the PIC group.  Notably,
> ALS was successful, as were the weather report and room audio.  You really
> have to see it to feel the impact all this will have.  Many thanks to all
> who worked hard (especially the crew at UH) to make the JT trial happen.
> I think PIC/ALS will turn heads, and we seem to be positioned to make
> a damn fine run at an eye-popping spring member meeting trial.

Congratulations!  Sounds like a wonderful success.

I'm looking forward to the spring member meeting.

I've dropped back these last two months as I wasn't going to be at
Joint Techs, but I do have some thoughts and will be glad to try to
help make the spring MM the next step in success.

More comments below...

>   More happened at JT than our trial of course and one presentation in
> particular I think we should take note of.  However, because the time-
> to-next-show is very short I'm going to begin a separate thread for that
> and reserve our Thursday call for trial related issues.

I'll respond separately after I gather some of my thoughts.

> [...]
>
>   One of the few negative comments I received concerned the lack of a
> MAC client.  Another was the difficulty of installing a linux client.
> We've had the great good fortune to have SIPc, and in the fall Session,
> (many thanks to both Xiaotao and Jeff) but I think we need to spend
> some time working out what we think a client should be/do/have i.e.,
> client requirements.  If we can produce such a document in a timely
> manner, it might be possible to shop it around in order to produce
> the broadest possible user experience.  Moreover, if we can do this at
> a fairly low level we might even be able to help ensure interoperability
> among the clients and with ALS.

I strongly agree.

Adding specific functionality to the clients and servers that we as a group
have some influence upon is reasonable as we try to create compelling and
useful demos.  At the same time, I want to feel confident that the choices
we make are directly aligned with standards efforts and/or could be seen as
clear winners from the standpoint of an IC tool vendor.  To me, this should
be a guiding principle. To be very clear, I didn't experience this demo and
have never run SIPc so I don't have an understanding of the specific
presence and location functionality that has been integrated.  Do we think
Microsoft and Apple will be willing to add similar functionality?  If not,
why not?

I want to be able to easily convince the folks at Microsoft and Apple as
well as WaveThree and Xten and many smaller development houses that they
should consider spending the resources to develop their tools in such a way
as to play well in the PIC demo at some upcoming meeting.  This, I think,
may be Jeremy's point in the goal of producing a client requirements doc.

I'm not as qualified as many of you to produce such a document, but once we
have one that we think is both thorough in content and reasonable in its
expectations, I think I can take another try at engaging Apple in the
conversation.  Again, I would hope that many IC vendors, large and small,
would take interest.

Talk to you tomorrow at 4pm EST!

^Deke

>   I'll send a separate note later today about the other thread I'd like
> the PIC group to consider.  Please note the call is back to its
> regular time Thursday at 4:00pm EST.  All feedback and additional
> agenda items are welcome.
>
> - Jeremy
>
>
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> --

-------
Deke Kassabian,  Senior Technology Director
Information Systems and Computing, Networking and Telecommunications
University of Pennsylvania   <URL:http://www.net.isc.upenn.edu/~deke>