[Asterisk-Dev] Re: Presence /* Moved to -dev */

[Olle E. Johansson]

John,
I've added your excellent summary to the wiki as work-in-progress, brainstorm. Just to keep it
somewhere as a basis for discussion:
http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk+presence+jtodd

On the road to presence there are at least two paths to choose from.
Let me brainstorm for a while...

* One thing is to check whether an *extension* is busy or not within Asterisk
-- We have that within the SIP channel with SUBCRIBE/NOTIFY

* Another thing is to check the status of a USER
-- That's something we really don't have in asterisk
-- And that's what everyone at Von was talking about

So as I see it, we have two paths to follow.

* Make Asterisk the presence solution
* Make Asterisk work together with another platform
-- SIMPLE
-- Jabber/XMPP

Since the phone status is only one part of the whole picture, I'm kind-of heading towards
path 2. A user running a SIMPLE or Jabber software should be able see other users' status
- away, available, in-the-bar, drunk, meeting, on-the-phone etc. As you see, the phone's
status is only one piece of the puzzle. Mark's bluetooth software is another interesting
piece of the puzzle.

Asterisk can handle text messages *within* the context of a call, not outside
the context of a call. Another reason to use another platform and adopt Asterisk to it,
delivering data.

So where are we?
I haven't found any open source SIMPLE platforms, please correct me if I'm wrong.
SER has some integration to Jabber, haven't had time to implement and test that.

I have a Jabber2 server up and running that we can test if you want to. It's easy to
create scripts to do Jabber things. Guess one can easily set up an AGI script to
check presence in jabber and base telephone busy/not busy decisions on that.
See http://www.reinvented.net/labs/article/1832 for ideas!

Other ideas
* You could send messages to a Jabber conference room to match a Meetme conference.
* Deliver voicemail notifications with jabber
* Change jabber status when a user answers phone call

In order to do anything like this we need to decide the 'person' entitiy in regards to asterisk
extensions/users/peers.
* An extension is not a user, some extensions may follow one person, some extensions serve many persons
* A user/peer/friend is a phone - persons may move between phones in some configurations

To end my brainstorm, I agree fully that this is needed. We need a presence solution that
works with Asterisk. I'm not sure it has to be within Asterisk, but it has to be
integrated to Asterisk in some way - maybe through the manager API.

It's late night and I'm writing as thoughts pop up, but, well, anyway, just another
view on this to add to the brew... :-)
/O