As you well know, there is already a proliferation of
occasionally convergent, but generally divergent, collaboration
technologies, applications, platforms, and providers out there
today. In an "always connected" world, the typical actor will find
his/herself needing to jump between/across their multiple
"communities" using, quite often, different modalities and devices
(voice, video, text, e-mail, blog entry, activity stream via phone,
netbook, handset, etc.). To "find someone" and to initiate
real-time collaboration with them is thus quite difficult in the
abstract. Providing interop, starting with areas such as presence
and authentication, list management, connection initiation, and
routing, would be a really good place to start. Many vendors are
exploring this within their own technology stack or in "like
stacks", but there still doesn't seem to be a clean way to achieve
it in a hetergeneous environment today.
Starting with something relatively easy and somewhat
standardized, such as XMPP-based services (specifically chat and
presence) is a logical place to begin.
I simply want a "push to collaborate" button, so to speak,
that can find the people/person/(devices?) I want to interact with
and initiate the relevant mode of collaboration across whatever
boundaries may need to be crossed. Not too much to ask, is it? ;-)
But back to the initial question, is this something that
could be implemented via some type of server plug-in in AFCS at
some point?
