I've heard a concern about whether presence awareness/instant messaging will promote unwanted interruptions to users. To minimize these interruptions, we offer key features in our products that give users control over their online presence, while still allowing them to leverage the incredible productivity and cost saving benefits of presence awareness. The most common thing I hear from customers and my own IBM colleagues is "I don't know how I lived without it."

Another very important thing to note on this topic is that the impact of presence goes far beyond instant messaging. A buddy list is just the first way this powerful capability came to market. Applying presence awareness to objects or applications is the wave of the future. IBM is at the forefront of this trend, with presence capabilities in IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, and IBM WebSphere Portal.

In addition, in our 2.5 release of Workplace Collaboration Services, we've implemented presence awareness into objects. For example, you and I might be working on a presentation that's stored in a shared folder. Because it's presence enabled, you can tell when I'm working on the document and thus choose an appropriate time to discuss edits. We've only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploiting the full value of what presence awareness can provide to organizations today and in the future.

David: Help us see into the future of collaboration. What's collaboration look like in 2006? 2010? 2015?

Akiba: I think the biggest trend we'll see is the movement away from "destination collaboration" and toward the use of "contextual collaboration". What I mean by that is, today you go to your email, or your buddy list, or your team-room application (i.e. a destination), and for the most part, none of them are connected to each other, nor are they connected to the specific activities and processes you work on during the day. In the future, the collaboration tools you use are going to be so woven into the fabric of how you work that you no longer think about the tools or "open" the tool to do work. They'll always be there in the context of when you need them.

I'll use a simple analogy to describe this. Thirty years ago, a common communication and collaboration tool--the telephone--was a "destination collaboration" tool. There was a phone in the center of the office that everyone went to and used. Today, with the invention of cell phones, it's now a "contextual collaboration" tool. If you're lost and running late for a meeting, you simply pick up your cell phone. It never occurs to you anymore to go find a phone first and then call. This type of shift has completely transformed the way we do things and how quickly we can get things accomplished.

Mick Moignard has been working and traveling with Lotus Notes since Release 2.0 in 1991. Mick is a DominoPower Senior Technical Editor and a Principal CLP with Unipart Expert Practices, a Lotus Advanced Partner in the UK. If you want to discuss anything to do with this article, or indeed anything else to do with Notes and Domino, contact Mick at Mick_Moignard@unipart.co.uk. Unipart Expert Practices will also happily discuss any opportunities you may have with any Notes and Domino application development or infrastructure projects you need help with. Unipart Expert Practices can be found at http://www.unipartep.com.