An Example of Using Presence and Availability in an Enterprise for Spontaneous , Multiparty , Multimedia Communications

distributed, team-oriented work environment, it is critical that team members should be able to conduct multiparty, multimedia conferencing spontaneously. Spontaneous conferencing is analogous to ad-hoc, drop-in meetings and impromptu discussions in multi-person offices. The knowledge of the presence and availability of team members can be effectively used to facilitate spontaneous conferencing. In this paper, we present SEC, a communications system designed to support spontaneous, ad-hoc conferencing in an enterprise. SEC makes an extensive and innovative use of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for presence and availability management, conference control, and text messaging. We also discuss in detail the design of SEC and report on the initial usage experience with SEC services.