A Presence-enabled Mobile Service System for Integrating Mobile Devices with Enterprise Collaborative Environment

Mobile worker’s presence and availability at mobile devices can be very crucial in enterprise collaborative environment due to the not-always-on nature of the mobile devices. We identify the key challenges in tracking the presence status of mobile device and user and in the integration of mobile devices with enterprise collaborative environment. We present the design ideas of a Presence-Enabled Mobile Service (PEMS) system that uses a device-resident Mobile Presence Agent (MPA) to automatically determine and update the presence of a mobile device and its user and securely integrates the presence information with enterprise collaborative environment via Web Services and SMS for the synthesis of user’s availability. A prototype system and its implementation are presented to verify the design concepts and the feasibility of the PEMS system.