A question about "Unified Communications" and the Telepathy model

[David Edmundson]

2011/7/31 Shaheed <srhaque at theiet.org>:
> Hi all,
>
> I just saw http://quintasan.blogspot.com/2011/07/telepathy-kde-ppa.html, and
> its pointer to the summary description of Telepathy over at
> https://gkiagia.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/what-is-telepathy-kde. I like the
> sound of what is going on very much, but I wondered how the "many small
> apps" model might work compared to some of the "Unified Communications"
> productsout there.
>
> To explain by way of example, Microsoft used to have these client programs:
>
> - Outlook calendar for scheduling meetings
>
> - An IM application called Office Communicator with MUC support
>
> - An electronic meeting application called Live Meeting supporting
>
> the usual shared whiteboards, desktops, video and audio etc.
>
> Over several releases, the level of ingtegration betwen these was increased
> in a way that corresponds directly to what I think Telepathy is doing, such
> as a unified notion of presence/busy/absence.
>
> One other thing the integration did was to make it easy to change the scope
> of a "meeting". For example, I might start in IM application, and ask
> somebody a quick question. During the following discussion, we realise that
> we actually need to bring in another person, or a shared whiteboard, or
> video. Adding (or dropping) these was gradually made smoother. I found this
> a very nice model to use.
>
> Now, I don't quite see how that might be achieved if the "many small
> programs" model means that the IM app is a distinct entity from the Audio
> app. I *think* this boils down to the notion of a session which the various
> apps and humans might be part of. Does Telepathy support that kind of
> concept (or something equivalent)?

Telepathy completely supports that concept on an even bigger scale.
In fact our 'many smaller applications' show that.

If we want to embed telepathy into plasma, kmail, organsier,
kbattleship etc we need to have something distributed.
The first step is to get away from the design of having "one big
massive IM client", which is what we're doing.

This page might help explain things better:
http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/Presentations
>
> Thanks, Shaheed
>
> _______________________________________________
> KDE-Telepathy mailing list
> KDE-Telepathy at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-telepathy
>
>