Signing up for more work

[fanf]

Foolish, I know, but I'll get stale if I do nothing but email. This week I are been mostly writing a draft proposal to be given to my senior management team, suggesting that I should implement a Jabber service for Cambridge University. All comments and suggestions welcome!

http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~fanf2/hermes/doc/jabber/proposal.txt

Comments

[fanf]

Jabber presence is somewhat orthogonal to whether someone is in the office: I hope that people will use Jabber when away in order to keep in touch, and its idea of presence is somewhat higher resolution than a leave diary - Jabber is immediate whereas leave works in terms of whole days planned some time in advance.

For event reminders IM seems like a good solution. It's probably easiest for departments to do this by deploying a little Jabber server of their own, in order to avoid authentication hurdles with the central server. Then the interesting functionality can be done quite simply based on one of the many client libraries.

[arnhem.livejournal.com]

I think my model of this is that Jabber presence and leave calendars can usefully interact. That is, that where a leave calendar entry exists for a day, it's nice for jabber presence to automatically include this information.

In terms of use in practice; the primary motivator for having leave/absence calendars is the problems (and indeed embarrassment) our senior administrative secretaries have when someone phones them out of the blue and asks to speak to a member of staff, and they have to admit that they don't actually know where they are, how to contact them, or indeed what country (/planet/universe ...) they're in.

To be useful for this purpose, there needs to be a single point of inquiry that receptionists and administrative secretaries can use when trying to track down a member of staff. The design issue, I suppose, is whether this single point is jabber presence, informed by leave calendar information, or a third agency that combines the jabber and calendar information. [ I don't think that having the leave calendar informed by the jabber presence is compatible with sanity ... ].

[fanf]

I agree that they are useful together.

I don't think it would be possible to alter someone's Jabber presence information based on the contents of a leave calendar. Presence is the kind of personal information which must be under a user's control: there would have to be some way to bypass user authentication in order for anything else to be able to change it. On the other hand, it would be fine for a departmental staff location service to subscribe to someone's Jabber presence if they allow it.