Adam Gartenberg's Blog

Sametime Quick Tip: Intelligent Location Awareness

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• Author: John Del Pizzo
• July 9, 2009
• Category:  Quick Tips  Sametime  John 

Pop Quiz:
1.        Do you consider geographic location a core component of presence awareness?
2.        Did you know that Sametime has intelligent location awareness?

Many people are familiar with Sametime's more traditional presence attributes, but did you realize Sametime also provides a way to indicate where you are physically located? The first screen shot, below, shows my geographic location in the contact list. The second one shows how others see this information in a chat window.

   

Why is location important? On one level, it's useful to help you decide if you should reach out to someone and what kind of response you should expect from them. For example, when the boss will be available for that urgent conference call may vary with her current time zone. Location information also allows you to pro-actively engage colleagues. There are over 10,000 IBM'ers in the Research Triangle Park area and I often find myself on calls with local IBM'ers from other parts of the company. We're able to shift calls to face-to-face meetings and do some old fashioned "social networking." Conversely, when I travel, I use the Buddy Map plug-in (shown below) to see who is near me for meetings or dinner.


Location information also plays a crucial role in call routing for Sametime Unified Telephony. Rather than ring all of your phones in the hope you answer one, SUT uses your location information, online status, availability, time of day and the in-bound caller ID to ring the right phone, based on the rules you define.

Sametime also uniquely features intelligent location awareness. When you move to a new location, Sametime recognizes it and prompts you to create a profile. The profile can include a custom name, city, state, country, postal code, a preferred phone number and whether you want to let others see this information. As you move between places, Sametime will automatically switch location profiles for you.

Take a moment to set your current geographic location. You can manually access them in the preferences panel or though the Location button in your Contact List.

Answers to the Pop Quiz:
1.        Of course location is a key component of rich presence!
2.        Intelligent location awareness is one of my favorite things about Sametime!

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