The Basics
Instant Presence Awareness: Delivering Information Instantly
Z-COMM enables small businesses to enterprise-level customers to operate in real
time by monitoring presence and availability in order to gather the right people
at the right time. Collaboration is not a new idea. Businesses grow and thrive through
teamwork and the power of shared ideas. However, successful collaboration is dependent
on the availability of the right people at the right time.
In today's fast-moving world, everyone is torn by time-sensitive issues. When can
you get the key players together? Decisions need to be made and events need to take
place in real time, hence the notion of the real-time enterprise. A real-time enterprise
is one that moves at the speed of life, gathering the right intelligence and consensus
to make timely contacts and decisions.
No businessperson is an island. Every decision requires research, consultation,
and communication with others. Thanks to the global economy, the right people do
not necessarily work in the same office, the same building, or even the same time
zone. How do you get them together? Various potential solutions exist: conference
calls, video conferencing, Web conferences, and even instant messaging. However,
they all assume that you have established contact. The fundamental question remains
- how do you find and gather the right people at the right time? The answer lies
in a new technology - Z-COMM.
To understand how presence awareness works, let's look at some of the problems inherent
in a fundamental building block of every business - meetings.
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You can't do business without holding meetings: sales pitches, planning meetings,
brainstorming sessions, status meetings, interviews, presentations, conference calls,
training classes. the list goes on. Every meeting takes place at the intersection
of three critical components: time, space, and the participants. Technology has
given us tools to reduce the spatial element, but timing remains a problem. In the
good old days, you simply scheduled the appropriate conference room and everyone
set aside the time and made arrangements to be there, including traveling if necessary.
Conference calls allow meeting participants to be in different locations and communicate
via a communal telephone call. Of course, they can't see each other or presentations
made in any location other than their own and they all still have to be in a specific
location at a pre-arranged time, but at least they can avoid some travel expenses.
Video conferences use proprietary networks to transmit both video and audio, so
meeting participants can both see and hear each other and their presentations. However,
they still have to physically assemble in a specially-equipped location for the
duration of the meeting. Again, travel expenses can be minimized, but this is offset
by the cost of the transmission and its expensive, proprietary equipment.
Web conferencing products somewhat reduce the hardware requirements and transmission
costs. Using the Web for video transmission and full-duplex audio, they allow people
to attend meetings and share presentations from any location that has Internet access.
However, pre-scheduling is still required and the expense of each session limits
the applicability of Web conferencing products to special circumstances or privileged
groups within the organization.
Enter Instant Messaging
In the mid-1990s, an interesting new approach to communicating exploded onto the
personal computing landscape - instant messaging (IM). This new social technology
allowed people to determine whether their friends were online and instantly connect
and communicate with each other. It became a hit because it is informal, immediate,
flexible, expressive, and free except for the nominal cost of a low speed Internet
connection.
The key concept behind IM is the notion of presence; that is, the ability for a
user to indicate that he/she is online and available, as well as the ability to
detect that others are also online and available. Why waste time with a phone call
or e-mail when you know that the other person is busy or unavailable? In fact, it
is often easier to get a quick response through IM than with a phone call or e-mail
message. You can also use IM to hold multiple conversations simultaneously.
As different vendors have implemented their disparate versions of IM, the capabilities
have expanded from simple text messaging to audio and video broadcasting, application-sharing,
and file exchange. However, communication is almost universally one-to-one. In addition,
IT organizations have a skeptical view of new technologies until their value can
be shown to be greater than the risk of their incorporation into the organization's
infrastructure. The growing ubiquity and maturity of this technology are starting
to convince many that there is, indeed, a place for IM in the business world.
Why is Instant communication Important
Time waits for no man and neither does modern business. The evolution of technology
has resulted in a rapid acceleration of the speed at which people work. As a consequence,
we may be geographically distributed and pressed for time. Things move quickly in
the real-time enterprise and people must keep pace. Often, we can't wait for a pre-determined
time to hold a meeting, or we need to be able to reach a critical resource as soon
as possible. So, while space may not be an issue, time, availability, and accessibility
have become acute factors.
The Challenge
Let's return to the fundamental problems with trying to bring people together in
the real world. You have limited time, yet you need to:
- Identify the right people
- Find them and determine whether they're available
- Bring them all together at the same time
- Interact with them in an affordable, secure, rich-media meeting environment that
doesn't require time-consuming setup or pre-scheduling and reservations
So how do we go about solving these problems? Let's start by clarifying what we
want - better tools build better teams.
You choose the Right People?
Most meetings are among people who know each other. Other potential participants
are subject-matter experts who may or may not be known; for example, someone from
the appropriate engineering team, a member of the sales support team, or a pricing
specialist. Sometimes it's useful or necessary to include people outside your group
or company. Now, what happens if some of the people you invite aren't available?
Much of the time, meetings can take place as long as a representative or designated
replacement attends. So the "right people" are simply those required to
achieve the objective of the meeting - whoever and wherever they are.
How do you get them to attend?
Bringing the right people to the same physical location is becoming more and more
impractical. Sure, it would be nice, but these days the answer has to include cyberspace.
And that's ok, as long as there is a way to determine participants' availability
and connect them electronically.
When Can they Meet?
For a real-time business, time is of the essence, but you also need to be flexible
enough to handle the demands on the meeting participants' time. Sometimes, you need
to meet immediately, even if that means that some of the right people can't make
it. Other times, you may be willing to wait until everyone (or a critical core)
is available to attend. If you choose this option, you also need some way to keep
track of everyone so that the meeting can start as soon as a critical mass is available.
Of course, you also need a way to schedule meeting time for situations that can
(or have to) wait.
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The process of finding and gathering the right people and bringing them together
in a timely fashion is called instant communication. As noted earlier, most products
attempt it by eliminating the time aspect; meetings are fixed in time by scheduling
them. That's not very flexible, but it is functional. Z-COMM uses presence information
about the people or resources who you want to bring together. This information already
exists; IM products maintain it, as do telephone service providers.
By monitoring presence to determine availability, you include the time dimension
because all information is current and updated in real time. So, you always know
who is available and who isn't, and you have a way to reach them instantly. As a
result, you can find them and gather them into any type of collaboration environment:
meeting, Web conference, conference call, etc.
Unlimited Secure Collaboration
Unlimited Collaboration from Z-COMM is a unique fusion of current technologies:
instant messaging, video conferencing, and Web collaboration. Similar to instant
messaging, Z-COMM uses presence awareness to check on the availability of contacts
and is ready to connect to them at any time. However, unlike IM, Z-COMM features
an abundant supply of tools that can have an immediate impact on your everyday processes,
and Z-COMM is designed for multi-point connections. From proprietary technology
such as Voice Connect to Collaboration, Z-COMM delivers.
Z-COMM's Workstation-Level Adaptive Security
Z-COMM's Encryption feature, supporting the IPSec standard, creates a completely
secured peer-to-peer encryption and PKI hierarchy. Z-COMM automatically encrypts
all data to and from the machines on which it is installed. Network administrators
can rest assure that the level of encryption for Z-COMM services across the entire
organization is completely secure.
Data is encrypted by Z-COMM at the origination point and is not decrypted until
it reaches the Z-COMM user on the other end of the transmission. With conventional
encrypting, data is only secured between the two network servers or appliances,
not end-to-end, leaving data at risk when traversing the internal and external networks.
However, with the Z-COMM Secure Network, information is fully protected from
source machine to destination machine. Z-COMM creates an encrypted tunnel for
each user and guest that connects to our servers.