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The U.S. and the developed world have witnessed a sharp growth in remote and mobile work patterns. The flexible office arrangements encompass a broad spectrum of situations, such as telecommuting (for home office workers or mobile workers), virtual offices, flex-time and part-time employment. As technology allows people to collaborate across time zones and continents, the concept of a single, physical workplace is becoming far less important than in the past. more»

The integration of Instant Messaging (IM) in a device-aware network, also known as Telepresence and Online Presence Awareness, is emerging as a hot development target. IM is moving out of teenage chat rooms and into offices and boardrooms, joining email and the cellphone as a mainstream workplace tool. more»

In the well-connected mobile or remote work environment, the people you need to reach right now may be available instantly. But how can you know? Do you simply guess their schedule and take your chances on the best way to make contact? A prototype at Sun Microsystems Laboratories integrates PDAs, pagers, cell phones, laptops, and desktops with advanced telephony capabilities, instant messaging and a calendar service to keep workgroups connected anytime, anywhere.

Colleagues and managers who need to contact mobile or remote workers often can't answer basic questions: Are their far-flung employees available? Can they drop what they're doing to pick up, call in, review an urgent issue or answer a question? Or are they in a meeting? With whom? Oh, and how best to reach them at the moment? Instant message their desktop computers? Call their cell phones? Page them?

These are the kinds of logistical questions that are popping up increasingly as work and worker go mobile and remote. By 2004, according to an IDC report (see "Going Mobile" sidebar) there may be 55 million remote or mobile workers in the U.S., up from 39 million in last year. As the trend catches on, it's anyone's guess how best to stay in touch.

Staying in Touch

Two geographically dispersed teams at Sun Microsystems Laboratories are fashioning a novel solution to the problem of keeping remote and mobile workers in touch. The joint project is headed by Principal Investigators Nicole Yankelovich and Will Walker. Yankelovich manages the Network Communities group. Walker leads the Speech Integration group. And the prototype they've built is code-named Awarenex.

Awarenex is a device awareness-and-communication application designed to help distributed work groups stay in contact with each other, even when they're mobile. "It helps you see if people are available for contact, and makes it easy to choose the right communication channel to reach them," says Yankelovich. Awarenex can also make the connection for you. From Awarenex, you can send an instant message, an e-mail, or a page. You can also initiate a phone call, start a file sharing application, or check someone's calendar or corporate database entry.

At a glance, it's possible to tell if someone is active on their computer keyboard, talking on the phone, or engaged in an instant message conversation. "For members of remote workgroups," says John Tang, who founded the Network Communities group with Yankelovich, "it's a way to virtually peek into someone's office window to see if they are available."

The group's user-friendly approach encourages the use of instant messaging (IM) as a way to make contact, which often leads to a phone call. It's called "switching media," and according to an ATT study, it is the way colleagues tend to use IM. "People start conversations with instant messages then transition to the phone," says Yankelovich. Awarenex explicity supports these types of media transitions.

"It's a way of making distributed workgroups feel more local," says Tang, who collaborates with Boston-based Yankelovich from his West Coast office.

On the flip side, technologies like Awarenex inevitably raise privacy concerns. Will malicious managers misuse the system to spy on their employees? "Awarenex was designed for people who yearn to stay in closer touch," explains Yankelovich, "but privacy issues were central in the design." Awarenex allows you to configure which colleagues can see your activity information, and if you choose not to use Awarenex, then your activity is not available to anyone.

Awarenex is probably the first prototype to integrate device awareness and IM with advanced telephony and calendaring into a single application. And it is part of the growing trend toward what market researchers call the Integrated Collaborative Environment (see "Getting it Together: IM Goes to the Workplace" sidebar).

Contact Me

Making it all possible, an awareness server receives activity and communication information reports from devices and from a telephony server. The awareness server propagates those changes throughout the network. The server makes available each person's status in a Contact List. The Contact List is displayed on device screens or is accessible by voice query by phone, and it shows only those people you need to stay in touch with.

The Contact List shows selected colleagues, their locale, and their device status (see Contact List on Palm illustration, below). Activity icons indicate if the person is currently using a device. The server displays elapsed idle times for unused devices. "The Contact List tries to address the question of whether people are available for communication," says Yankelovich, "and if so, what the best option for communicating might be." For example, a telephone icon next to a name indicates that person is on the phone, so a phone call is not the best way to get in touch right now. Sending an instant message might be more effective.

Clicking a Contact List entry brings up the Contact Locator, which provides more detailed "awareness information" and presents options for contacting that person (see Locator menu illustration, below). The display shows a person's idle or logged out time on all of his or her devices. A locale name in bold indicates Awarenex's best guess about how to contact someone. All options are available, however, allowing you to make the final judgement. And helping you make that judgment is the built-in calendar capability. Knowing whether, and perhaps with whom, your colleague has an appointment helps you decide how interruptible he or she is at the moment.

Awarenex Contact List on a Palm. We can see that Nicole was last active in her office 23 minutes ago. The clock indicates that she currently has a calendar appointment. Bo is mobile now and using a handheld device. He is also on the phone. Frank logged out 2 hours and 46 minutes ago.	Locator menu. Clicking on a person's name brings up more detail about their device usage and provides all the possible ways of contacting them. The first entry in the menu show his upcoming calendar appointment. Selecting that item will bring up their full calendar.

For a quick check of what your colleagues are up to, your Awarenex Contact List is also available on a web page (see Web-based Contact List illustration). "The web interface can be handy," comments Paul Lamere, the developer of this component, "if you're connecting briefly from home or from a drop-in center."

Web-based Contact List (Click to Enlarge). Awarenex Contact List as it looks displayed in a web browser.

Ubiquitous Phones

One of the more interesting design challenges for Walker was developing a "speech platform" on the Solaris[tm] Operating Environment. "Awarenex is a great project for speech integration because people on the go may not always have access to a computer or PDA, but telephones are ubiquitous. Using a phone, you can quickly call up Awarenex, find out if someone is available, and have a range of options beyond voice mail for contacting that person," says Walker. The speech interface allows a phone caller to voice-query a person's availability and interactively direct Awarenex to make contact. For example, if a colleague calls your phone and you do not pick up, she could identify herself as an Awarenex user and go through the following dialog:

Awarenex would then transfer the call or you could initiate contact from a wireless Palm. Finding that Tom is available, you click on the Palm to call him. Awarenex infers that you are mobile (since you initiated the call from your Palm) and dials your cell phone. You answer and hear a voice announce "transferring to Tom" and you're connected.

Integrating the Device Network

"The hardest engineering problems were providing the illusion that the various devices talk to each other directly and integrating all the various networks together in a reliable manner," observes Bo Begole, Awarenex's software architect. The networks include TCP/IP on the Internet, corporate intranet, and wireless CDPD network, plus the Mobitex wireless pager network and the landline and cellular telephone networks. Each has different bandwidth and latency characteristics.

The team solved the integration problem by using TCP/IP as the basic transport and providing gateways to the various other networks. To integrate the cellular and landline phone networks, Philip Kwok and other team members created their own mini-PBX that communicates with the other services via TCP/IP. "Once the gateways were in place, it was simple to create the illusion of the devices talking to each other," says Frank Richichi, a Network Communities group member.

The prototype supports clients on a range of platforms. For wireless, a Palm Vx is connected via a Novatel Minstrel modem with OmniSky service and a RIM Blackberry 957 uses a Mobitex pager network. Desktop and laptop users can choose between a full-featured stand-alone client or the web interface. Lastly, a speech client provides access through spoken language.

The SPARC[tm]Solaris-based telephony system uses DSP hardware from Natural Microsystems, speech recognition software from Nuance Communications, and speech synthesis software from Fonix.

All Awarenex components are written using the Java[TM] programming language, with the exception of the RIM and Palm clients, which are written in C++. The central database, which contains all user contact and awareness information, is managed using iPlanet's Directory Server.

Yankelovich's group's expertise is fashioning an easy-to-use design that builds on users' existing work practice. The premise of the Awarenex design is to work within each device interface. "Awarenex helps make the various devices you carry with you (e.g., cell phone, wireless palm) a more cohesive unit," says team member John Tang.

For more information on Awarenex, see the Network Communities home page.

Related Links

• BYTE.com Interview with Bo Begole
• John Tang and Awarenex in Time Magazine

Executives Enterprises will work more effectively if employees have better tools for communicating and collaborating at a distance. Investors Sun is investing research dollars into prototypes to explore services aimed at improving communication and collaboration among distributed work groups. Service Providers Awareness services, such as Awarenex, will be in demand from consumers as enterprises become more and more geographically distributed. Developers Awarenex is one way to take advantage of an awareness service. This sort of service can also be integrated into many other applications. System Administrators Carefully designed awareness services can be tuned to the users' needs and corporate work policies. Awareness services that are designed for use in the enterprise will integrate with corporate directory services and incorporate mechanisms for secure messaging and communication.

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