I am posting a response to a question I received about federating DiVitas mobile Presence. It was an interesting question and I thought the thread was worthy of a blog post in order to share the information.

Question posted to our Mobile Presence Makes Every Call Count blog: "I certainly agree with the concept of checking "availability" before blindly making a real-time contact. However, how do you do this without “federating” such capabilities across various groups, as opposed to just within a single business organization?"

Answer: Today DiVitas supports checking Mobile Presence and Status before placing a call or sending an IM within a community of users supported by one or more DiVitas servers. In this scenario, each geographic location of a large organization would have its own DiVitas server and would federate with other DiVitas servers within the overall organization.

For example, using our own solution, we at DiVitas federate between our offices in Europe, India, Boston and our Silicon Valley headquarters. I can simply look at the interface on my interface and know what my DiVitas colleagues are up to whether they are working alongside me here in Mountain View, Calif. or they are located in India, Boston or the U.K.

Also, wherever possible, DiVitas takes advantage of existing standards making it a straightforward engineering process to federate DiVitas Mobile Presence with Presence capabilities offered by other popular applications (such as Microsoft OCS, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) Plans are in place to federate to these popular applications through standard interfaces to allow users to go outside of their DiVitas community and view Presence across individual organizations.

Mobile Presence and Status comprise DiVitas’ Enterprise Social Networking capabilities:
  • Mobile Presence is displayed on the DiVitas smartphone’s interface as an icon similar to Yahoo IM (showing emoticons to indicate if you are available, not available.) However, DiVitas' Presence icon also shows whether you are reachable by voice or IM chat, or maybe you are temporarily on a call and all together unavailable for communication (in which case Do Not Disturb calls go straight to voicemail.)
     
  • Status message is coupled with the Mobile Presence icon on a DiVitas smartphone, providing an additional level of detail to availability about where you are and what you are doing (i.e. at the airport waiting for a 5pm flight.)