Presence and IntComm WG

[Jeremy George <>]

Hello All,

  Sorry for the delay in reporting from the FMM, but I'm just now back
on my feet after an interesting trip home (first time a flight I was on
ever made an emergency landing) and a bout with an unnamed virus.

  The trial was missed by at least some folks.  I had encouragement to
bring it to the spring MM.  I also had one person ask about whether we
were planning on packaging the code.

  Boy did we miss Ben C. at the wg meeting.  Ben T. passed some draft
notes to me.  I've melded them with my own scrawl below.  Additions/
corrections/deletions are welcome.  My sense is that we made a pretty
good start at a self-evaluation but that there's more to do to figure
out the actual shape of next step efforts.

  Thanks to all who participated.  Stephen Kingham, Joe Roark, Deke
Kassabian, Chris Celiberti, Ben T., George Brett, Todd Needham, Bruce
Mazza, John Stier, Alistair Munro, Rodger Will and Jeremy George.

  Deke opened by pointing out that with the terrific partnerships of
HP and Columbia we had moved way out onto the bleeding edge.  Maybe,
too far.  Should we back up to simple presence for the moment and let
vendors catch up to us?

  If we do that, I asked how we move forward, reporting on the lessons
we've learned, without losing momentum?

  John S. thought that manual presence with strong security controls
would be a good start.

  Todd noted that Microsoft would like to engage with us but they need
to have a clear sense of their time commitment.

  I noted that I felt a major failing of the group to date was in
discovering how people actually want to communicate?

  Most of the discussion was about UAs.  We came to a substantial
agreement that we need a stable, fully functioning, cross-platform UA
(or a series of UAs for each of the major platforms.) We came to a
substantial agreement early on that we do not want to take on the task
of developing such a UA ourselves.  So, this would appear to leave us in
the position of needing to encourage (Deke had an idea here) a vendor,
or vendors, to help us out.  Minimally, it means our requirements
document should be up-to-date.

  There was general agreement that publishing, in some sense, was a
good idea, but no specific proposals were made.

  There was discussion of whether versioning would be helpful.  I don't
recall a consensus.

  On behalf of a colleague, I asked whether we felt we could package
PALS as plug 'n play.  The answer was, no.  At least not for some time.

  I think there was substantial consensus that we should bring the
trials back, but not on what they should look like.

  Again, additions, deletions and corrections are all welcome.  Let's
pick up on the discussion Thursday.

- Jeremy

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