Presence and IntComm WG

[Jamey Hicks <>]

Tyler Johnson wrote:

> If it proves helpful, we can use the ViDeNet system as a user management
> tool. It allows the creation of users, SIP accounts, directory population,
> etc. So it has an enterprise directory, and H.350 directory, white pages,
> and account management features. I'm not arguing for it, just saying that is
> a resource that is available.
>
> One possibility might be to customize a user agent to auto-configure based
> on the contents of the H.350 directory.
>
> Again, I would like to see a higher level problem description, as I feel a
> little like we are saying 'we have all these tools, what can we build'
> rather than 'what do we want to build...'
>
>  
What we want to build:

The PIC WG is planning to run another PIC trial at the fall member 
meeting in Austin.  The point of this trial is to give users a taste of 
presence-integrated communications without having to have their 
institution deploying one.  At the fall MM, users should be able to get 
a taste of PIC without installing any software, using a browser on their 
computers or using a public web kiosk.  If they choose to install a SIP 
UA, they can get a richer experience of presence integrated communication.

One of the common difficulties at past meetings is provisioning of user 
agents.  We would like to streamline that as much as possible.  One 
problem of the way the trial is structured is that participants need to 
authenticate against and use the pals.internet2.edu SIP proxy because it 
has capabilities their campus SIP infrastructure lacks (if they have one).

In the trials, participants authenticate using their standard email 
address as username.  The SIP proxy is set up to do "domain hijacking", 
authenticating and handling any domain address belonging to a registered 
meeting attendee.  It is kind of a funny setup but seems to be required 
for the trial.

One of the other constraints of the trial is that it is very difficult 
to get changes made to user agents.  In past trials, only sipc from 
Columbia has supported the advanced features.  We do not currently have 
a UA for OS X that supports these features.  Adding H.350 authentication 
to the UA requirements might leave us with none, but we still have 
enough lead time to get features added.

The digest authentication hack for SER would let us use common 
credentials without adding to the SIP UA requirements.  That is an 
advantage, though in the long term I expect SIP UA's to support LDAP 
directory lookup and so supporting H.350 would not be much of a difficulty.

So anyway, knowing what is possible is useful because it helps us design 
an implementation for the fall member meeting.  I still have two 
questions before recommending a design for the meeting:

1) will any of the SIP UA's support our other requirements (e.g., 
simple, pidf, and xcap) and also H.350?

2) How can we simplify the provisioning of clients for the meeting?  If 
there are multiple meeting services that require authentication, then it 
simplifies provisioning if they can use a single 
directory/authentication.  That would be a big win but will require some 
coordination.

Jamey