Walled gardens have been a characteristic of presence and real-time messaging since the beginning, but the time has come for these walls to come down. Presence enjoys the benefits of network effects - the more presence nodes, the more valuable presence becomes.

How can vendors speak of interoperability yet continue to force their customers into walled presence gardens? Can you imagine unified communications systems where the telephony and email services only work within the walled garden? Federated presence, based on open standards, allows users of unified communications systems to view the presence of all of those with whom they need to communicate and to publish their presence to others. The value of presence in unified communications is greatly diminished if it is restricted to a subset of those people - those who happen to be using the same UC platform.

Mike Gotta asks some excellent questions in his report from the Microsoft Unified Communications launch:

The link to presence and identity is a really important point - and to extend that into the area of social computing is another direction to consider re: social presence not just presence as it pertains to a network, device or application (refer to my earlier post “Social Presence: We Need To Push The Reset Button“.

That said - it raises some questions:

• Why does Microsoft still not federate with Google via XMPP?
• Why does Microsoft not openly state its direction on some of the IETF-related presence standards?
• Should Microsoft take its PSOM protocol (used in its web conferencing components) and treat it as an open standard (similar to XMPP)?
• Will Microsoft openly expose its granular rich presence information in a bi-directional manner to other vendors (Microsoft’s assumption is that OCS is the master presence platform but many companies will have more than one presence aggregation point)?

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan’s challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Brandenburg Gate: Open this gate! Unified communications providers, tear down this wall!