Along with Eric Mack of ICA, and Eva Wiley of Unisys, I presented at the April 1997 conference of the Electronic Messaging Association. Our topic was the future of collaborative applications, and I recall talking about "schedule-enabled applications", those that would read your current appointments, and take actions based on those, eg, route phone calls to your mobile phone automatically because you were driving between meetings. I've lost my slide deck, but I know Eric still has the recording somewhere.
In the past couple of days, I've met up with two vendors offering (my term) "schedule-enabled applications":
- Orative's Enterprise Server will use the existence of meetings in a user's calendar to automatically set that user's presence to something other than "available". When the meeting time rolls around, the user doesn't have to change their presence and availability ... the Orative solution does it automatically.
- SiteScape's Enterprise Forum and Zon offerings deliver interactive real-time collaborative capabilities with a workspace metaphor. In a future release, presence and availability will be automatically set by reading the user's calendar.
Way cool. Here's to more of this in the future!
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