A Client-Side Architecture for Supporting Pervasive Enterprise Communications

Abstract

Pervasive, context-aware enterprise communications applications rely on detailed knowledge of people's contexts to facilitate efficient communications between people. We describe the challenges and intricacies in collecting and disseminating relevant user context data for the purpose of complex decision-making in enterprise communications applications. We show that the continuous and user-transparent collection of context elements such as user presence and activity enables certain simple decisions in communications applications while other decisions may depend on additional, communication task-specific user context details. These details can be acquired by applications as needed through what we call dialogs in which users explicitly interact with communications applications. The rendering and processing of such dialogs is predicated on our notions of device context and dialog presence. We present the architecture and implementation of our client-side system Argus that addresses the context gathering and propagation challenges. We show how Argus, in conjunction with pervasive, context-aware enterprise communications applications, can accelerate and improve decision-making in an enterprise with a high level of convenience for users when establishing communications in response to enterprise events