Research studies have shown that the effectiveness of collaboration and the choice of communication modality is intricately linked with the perceived presence and availability of the collaborating parties. Most collaboration systems offer users the ability to publish their presence for effective col

Collaboration among enterprise users is often enhanced by their prior history that may include summary of the topics discussed, people involved, documents shared, and other such profile information. In enterprises, unlike in consumer collaboration, sharing this profile information could be extreme

Many network services such as email services and online social networking applications offer enhanced capabilities to standard communication services by mining user data. Examples of such services are friend suggestions, marketing recommendations, etc. In this paper, we look at enhancing related people or a simple contacts application by inferring a dynamic set of relevant people for users at any given time. We argue that this problem is non-trivial and different from finding friends and recommendation systems. We present models for influences of multi-modal communication units that determine the relevance score of people. We present our approach along with performance and evaluation details from a deployed service in a real enterprise communication network.

Social networking applications leverage valuable information from social graphs and integrate communication capabilities to offer new services. However, currently, these applications are limited to communication capabilities such as click-to-call or click-to-conference. Once the communication session is established the social context and the communication context are not integrated in these services. For social network communication services such integration permits new and novel user services. Further, enabling those services in the enterprise context will enhance social networks as a communication and collaboration tool in enterprises. In this paper, we look at such services and argue that social network applications and enterprise social networking communication applications have some fundamental differences. We discuss new notions such as transient relationships, domain separation, user views, and several other issues that need to be addressed for enabling new social networking communication services for enterprises. We present a model that addresses these issues and describe our prototype implementation with a use case example.

Online collaboration platforms such as Google Wave provide basic tools for collaboration and communication as well as an interface to include external applications. Separately, we have defined a collaboration platform called ConnectedSpaces which extends these basic capabilities towards enterprise use. Using the ConnectedSpaces model, here we categorize, illustrate, and analyze new types of feature interactions for collaboration platforms. Furthermore, we discuss handling feature interactions which are caused by using ConnectedSpaces as a communication endpoint with enterprise communication platforms. The work in this paper is novel as it is the first investigation into feature interactions with collaboration platforms. Our approach uses a runtime feature interaction technique which can cope with features provided by different organizations.

Online virtual worlds offer exciting new opportunities for enterprises or businesses. To exploit these opportunities enterprises need to find a way to integrate virtual world services with their real-world services, and to exploit virtual worlds rich collaboration environment to offer new or enhanced services. However, there are many challenges to realizing these goals, such as resolving virtual and real identifications, controlling communication sessions between real and virtual world entities, and managing resources in both worlds. In this paper, we study these issues and propose a framework for integrating virtual worlds into enterprise service work flow. We implemented a customer service in a VW contact center that is integrated with corresponding enterprise services. We also present a novel mechanism in virtual worlds that allow users to bring their own resources, along with the contact center resources, and share the resources with other customers or agents to resolve customer issues. Further, we present experiences from our prototype.

With the availability of application development frameworks, such as iPhone, Android, etc., there is a huge shift in application development towards providing user-centric services on communication end-points (phones). A key aspect of such frameworks and of the services developed using those frameworks is that they are often independent of communication sessions. In this paper we argue that there is a class of applications that could enable novel new applications that interact with communication sessions. Most end-point frameworks do not deal with such applications because they seem to require complex call control modeling and application arbitration. In this paper, we motivate the need for applications that interact with communication sessions, propose a framework that allows rapid development of user-centric services without the need for complex call modeling or application arbitration. We present our realization of the proposed framework with examples and use cases from live trial systems.

Several trends in SIP application server deployments in large scale telephony environments exacerbate the classic problem of feature interaction : use of distributed feature servers, mixing of legacy and green-field feature servers, and the co-existence of multiple third-party feature implementations provisioned in the same environment. Next-generation SIP application servers will include an application router (AR) to provide more application control over feature sequencing. As we discuss here, the AR can be augmented to incorporate feature interaction detection and resolution logic. We describe a novel design for run-time feature interaction detection and resolution in an environment of distributed feature servers using a SIP application server with application routing function, such as that defined in JSR 289. The approach is based on the algorithm of the Kolberg-Magill (K-M) method for feature interaction detection. Here we extend the notation of the algorithm to cover advanced call control services, enable the algorithm to work in topologies involving B2BUAs (Back-to-Back User Agents) and SBCs (session border controllers), and test the approach with a substantial feature set of 32 features found in large enterprise solutions.

Current P2P communication applications offer only a limited set of call processing services. However, this is likely to change due to services being integrated into the overlay and third party service provisioning. The particular focus of this paper is the problem of feature interactions. We illustrate some examples and show the applicability of previous methods of telephony feature interaction analysis to the peer-to-peer model.

Distributed systems have evolved from highly regular systems to irregular systems that are not based on any specific architecture. Highly optimized distributed algorithms that are often variants of classic data structures have been developed for these systems. However, such approaches may not be effective for applications built on loosely coupled irregular distributed systems. In this paper, we look at distributed priority queues for such systems, where the locality of items cannot be altered and bottlenecks at any one node should be avoided. We present QPID, a new distributed priority queue algorithm for irregular distributed systems in which nodes communicate via message passing only. We introduce mechanisms to track and update the head of a logical distributed priority queue without moving items between nodes and avoiding bottlenecks at any single node. A novel lazy update scheme is employed for improving the efficiency of our algorithm. We present our analysis of QPID and argue its correctness.

While application-layer multicast (ALM) can re- duce latency and permit deployment in networks without network-layer multicast, often, it does not leverage application- specific behavior. For example, the existing ALM-based peer-to- peer (P2P) conferencing systems route media packets based only on bandwidth and on transmission delay without considering P2P conferencing specific behavior and varying mixing capabilities of participating peers. We propose an enhanced hybrid ALM-based P2P conferencing architecture that can leverage participating peers with different capabilities. We also present a three-step algorithm to construct such a hybrid ALM-based P2P conference. We have built a prototype for our architecture. Results from our prototype show that our approach is more scalable than the existing ALM-based P2P conferencing systems.

Online virtual worlds are attracting businesses that intend to offer new enterprise class services. Often, these services in virtual worlds are closely linked with the real enterprise resources. For a successful deployment of these services, a mixed reality model with communications that extend the virtual worlds to enterprise resources is required. In this paper, we take a look at this new class of collaborative applications by using a customer service application as an example. We discuss various issues in offering such a service, lay out the requirements, propose an architecture for mixed reality communications, and present our prototype implementation. We believe that this example service can introduce a mixed reality based communication paradigm that is applicable to a wide range of other business or enterprise services.