EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Integrating the Cisco Context Aware Mobility solution with unified communication applications such as presence and instant messaging can greatly enhance the level of business productivity and operational efficiency today s mobile workers require. Extending the value of location based services the Cisco Context Aware Solution captures both location and contextual information such as the operational status and availability of a person or business asset. The Context Aware Mobility solution can enhance unified communication applications by providing mobile users with automatic updates to the location and status of a mobile resource in real-time based on pre-defined rules triggered by the context of the environment the user or asset is in. Context Aware Mobility delivers key information about assets and resources critical to business collaboration and workflow efficiency in response to typical operational questions such as: - Where is it? - Is it here? - What is its condition? - What is its status? - Where in my network is it? This solution overview will focus on how the Cisco Context Aware Mobility solution can interface with virtually any unified communications system to provide mobile users with intelligent, real-time information to answer the question: What is its status based on the answers to the questions Is it here or Where is it? and any other information needed to optimize collaboration and business processes. The technologies and components that comprise the solution will be introduced and examples will be provided to demonstrate the benefits of automatically providing mobile workers with the right information at the right time based on the network intelligence and visibility offered by Context Awareness to presence applications. Figure 1. Context Awareness for Presence applications What is His/Her Status? Authoring Template: Solution Overview (template: 091007kb) Page 1
Asset Tracking Zone/Inventory Management Condition Tracking Presence Network Location Services What Is His/Her Status? CHALLENGES As today s workforce becomes more mobile and business processes more complex, collaboration and workflow efficiency has become an increasing challenge. The inability to locate and determine the availability of a key asset or resource when and where it is needed is a primary source of business inefficiency leading to delayed collaboration and decision-making, reduced productivity and responsiveness and potential lost opportunities for revenue generation or objective fulfillment. There has been a proliferation of devices, services and applications designed to address this challenge for the mobile user each offering its own value. Presence provides the ability to determine if someone is connected to the network and if so how they can be contacted (by phone, via IM, or email etc.) but what if their status changes? To optimize the value of presence information, it must be accurate and updated in a timely manner. Today presence status must be updated manually by each user. If users are either not committed to keeping their status accurately updated or they simply forget to do so, the process can become more cumbersome and unreliable than useful. Location information indicates when a resource or a contact is in a specified area or even if it is operational but not necessarily if it is available. As an example you may be in your office building and online but in a presentation and not available to accept a call or respond to an instant message. Unless you have manually changed your status to Do Not Disturb others may continue to try to reach you and will disturb your presentation with phone calls or instant message popups. Similarly if you do manually change your presence indicator to Away or Do Not Disturb while in a meeting, you may forget to remove that indication when your meeting is over, causing others to think you are unavailable for collaboration. Or perhaps, you may be available for contact but in a different building on campus and unable to join your manager in his office for an impromptu meeting with a client, which can cause disruption and inefficiency. Or consider another scenario a colleague in building A schedules a meeting with you in your office in building B to accommodate you. However you have just learned that you must attend a presentation in building A and set your status to busy. If your presence application could reflect more that just busy of available but more specifically change to in Building A as you enter the building, both parties could be alerted and could arrange through context awareness and unified communication features a more efficient meeting without having to go back to the other building. Again today s presence applications require manual administration in order to provide others with information about the type of connection users have to the network and the status of their availability. Yet even the status that can be shared is limited to pre-defined categories such as busy, available, or away. The Context Aware Mobility solution with integrated presence offers a rich automated presence experience with updates based location metrics that calculate your physical location such as at home, in a meeting, In building 4, and coordinates that with contact preferences based on your location such as IM when in a meeting, desktop phone when at your desk, or mobile phone when in another building. Cisco Context Aware Presence Applications Solution Overview Page 2
SOLUTION OVERVIEW The Cisco Context Aware Mobility solution captures real-time contextual information such as the location, availability or identity of a mobile user from a pervasively deployed Cisco Unified Wireless Network and integrates that information with an open ecosystem of business applications such as Presence. Figure 2. Cisco Context Aware Mobility Solution Architecture Context Aware Software module Cisco Mobility Services Engine Open API Cisco Wireless Control System Si Application and Management Si Wi-Fi TDOA Receiver Cisco Wireless LAN Controller Cisco Aironet Access Point Network TDoA Cisco Compatible Tags Chokepoint 125 khz Cisco Compatible Tags Wi-Fi Devices Tag and Devices The different components of the Cisco Context-Aware Mobility Solution needed to enhance presence and other unified applications include: Cisco Context Aware Presence Applications Solution Overview Page 3
Client devices: Any Wi-Fi device that connects to the WLAN, including laptops, dual-mode phones, and wireless IP phones, can have its associated location information captured. Cisco Unified Wireless Network: As the only unified wired and wireless network solution that cost-effectively addresses the wireless security, deployment, management, and control issues that businesses face, a pervasively deployed Cisco Unified Wireless Network also provides the infrastructure to support Context Aware Mobility. Mobility Services Engine (MSE): A central element of the Cisco Unified Wireless Network, the MSE platform hosts the Cisco Context-Aware Mobility solution software that captures, stores, and analyzes contextual information from any wired and wireless network connected to the Cisco Unified Wireless Network. Cisco Context-Aware Software for clients: The Cisco Context Aware Software is hosted on the Cisco Mobility Services Engine. Cisco Context-Aware Software makes it possible to capture and integrate information into business processes using data received from Wi-Fi clients and location technology optimized for indoor, outdoor or high ceiling environments and to the type of business problem being addressed (i,e, is it here?, where is it, etc.) o o o RSSI This software running on the Cisco Mobility Services Engine can be used for devices and tags that need to be located indoors. It is based on the signal received from the mobile asset to the different access points deployed in the facilities. Chokepoint Chokepoints use a different frequency than Wi-Fi and are deployed along zones of interest for the business applications. They act as exciters for Wi-Fi tags or devices that come within a close range to them. These tags, in turn, send a notification via WLAN to the Cisco Mobility Services Engine along with the contextual data they have captured. TDoA This software running on the Cisco Mobility Services Engine is used in association with tags and TDoA receivers that are placed outdoors or in RF challenging environments where mobile assets have to be located. Cisco Open API Once all the contextual information has been captured, calculated and stored by the Context Aware Mobility Service module, it can be made available to any business application that needs it via the Cisco open API based on SOAP/XML protocols. Access to this API is available to any technology partner and allows a full integration into customers business processes. The Cisco Context Aware Mobility Solution is built upon an adaptive, agile and intelligent Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) that delivers superior end-user experience and enables significant efficiency for businesses. The solution offers a broad range of wireless technologies that deliver solutions to variety of business problems and also act as a platform open to any type of mobile asset and any type of business applications deployed on our customers premises. As an open platform, Context Aware can tightly interface with any Enterprise business applications including Cisco Unified Communication applications to add contextual intelligence and automation to collaborative interaction and standard business processes. Integrating Context Awareness with presence and preference information can be used for example to determine the location, operational status, availability and best method of access to key resources such as decision makers or subject matter experts. Or context driven alerts can be configured to notify employees by voice or text message to perform specific business processes such as powering down equipment before leaving a building or picking up customer service coverage for an unattended area. Integrating Context Aware Solutions with Unified Communications is made simple with the Cisco Unified Application Environment a rich end-to-end platform that streamlines the development and deployment of converged applications by abstracting implementation differences across products and technology types to ensure reliable seamless interoperability.. Cisco Context Aware Presence Applications Solution Overview Page 4
PRESENCE APPLICATIONS WITH CONTEXT AWARENESS: IMPROVING BUSINESS COLLABORATION AND EFFICIENCY Healthcare Business Problem: Efficient communications between hospital staff is a key element for delivering high quality patient care. However in a Forrester Consulting survey over 65% of nurses reported that as much as 60 minutes a day is spent trying to reach other staff members which can ultimately impact patient care. As a result, communication applications such as presence and instant messaging are frequently relied upon to keep highly mobile physicians, nurses and other healthcare staff connected and aware of information such as which staff members are available for clinical collaboration. However in an environment where time is imperative and caregivers are always on the move between patient rooms, surgery or the pharmacy, locating and engaging with resources critical to patient care should be instant and intelligent. Having to manually update the status of applications to make them accurate and relevant detracts from the level of productivity they are capable of delivering. For instance, if a cardiologist enters the emergency room to perform a surgery, he is unavailable for general collaboration and would only want to be contacted with urgent information relevant to that patient - such as an inaccurate lab result. With presence indication alone the clinician would be responsible for manually changing his status from Available to Unavailable. If he forgets, he could be interrupted by others trying to reach him with nonurgent issues. If he does take the time to make the change, he would need to rely on other means of communication to directly receive urgent patient information. Solution: Healthcare organizations that need to support mobile caregivers with automated real-time insight to the location and availability of key resources can receive that information from the Context Aware Mobility solution. Hosted on the Cisco Mobility Services Engine, the Context Aware software can leverage RSSI or TDOA technology to detect the location of the Wi-Fi device (notebook computers, dual-mode phones or Wi-Fi PDAs) or the RFID badge of a mobile healthcare worker as they roam in or out of the healthcare facility. Through the open API of the MSE, the solution interfaces with any Unified Communications system such as Cisco Unified Communications Manager to deliver for example, automated presence status for more accurate visibility of critical resources. Context Awareness could also use Chokepoint technology to determine when a caregiver has entered an area such as the emergency room, to deliver context specific information relevant for that user in that location using a communications format that has been pre-define according to the user s profile rules. For instance when the cardiologist enters the emergency room a Chokepoint is triggered which signals the Context Aware software to automatically update the clinicians presence status to In Surgery. The clinicians Context Aware profile rules would indicate that when presence is set to In Surgery only communications about the patient in that surgery room should be sent to a speakerphone in that room and all other communications directed to a mailbox. Benefits: Mobile clinicians and healthcare staff need accurate instantaneous access to the right people, the right information and right equipment at the right time and place. Integration of the Context Aware Mobility Solution with unified communication applications provides accurate real-time visibility to the resources and information mobile users need based on automated updates to their physical location and communication availability. If caregivers are required to manually update this information, it ultimately detracts from the time they could be spending with patients. Whether they are in a patient s room, in surgery in the ER, taking a break outside or in transit down the hall, the information provided by these solutions dynamically enable a collaborative, synergistic environment where knowledge and information can be seamlessly shared and workflow processes optimized. Office Environment Business Problem: Protecting customer relationships from competitive threat means businesses must deliver superior customer service and competitive advantage. For instance, identifying a technology expert with the right skill set to Cisco Context Aware Presence Applications Solution Overview Page 5
address a customer s request or concern is one step towards customer satisfaction. However, as the workforce becomes more mobile, determining the availability of a subject matter expert becomes more difficult if they are constantly on the move and not always committed to keeping their presence indicator up-to date. The ability to add automatic, rules driven context awareness to collaborative business processes is what is truly needed to optimize joint expertise and add a new dimension of competitive advantage. Consider a sales team in a briefing center presenting a new product demonstration to a customer. If the customer has a specific technical question the sales team cannot address, determining accurate, real-time availability of the nearest technical expert to join the meeting is critical. The sales manager could use a presences application from his laptop or mobile phone to determine if a technical engineer is available but without the network intelligence of the Context Aware solution, the presence information may not be up to-date and the proximity of the nearest technical expert to the meeting room would not be provided which would cause a delay in the meeting and lead to dissatisfaction of the customer. Solution: Instead of having to look up the availability of the technical engineer with a presence application, and then check their proximity with a location application only to call or instant message the engineer and find out that he had not manually updated his presence indicator and really isn t available, the Context Aware Mobility solution streamlines and automates real-time presence and context aware location information based on user defined rules. As a user moves throughout the enterprise the context of his environment is used to automatically update his presence and communication preferences. Consider that the technical engineer the sales manager is looking for has just left his office and is on his way to the cafeteria in the next building. Chokepoint technology could be used to detect when he has left one building and entered another. While outside, TDO technology can be used to calculate his exact location and proximity to the meeting room. That real-time information is then integrated with a presence application to automatically update his presence status. Based on the policy definitions for the user, it could indicate that when he leaves his building or is outside his service calls are automatically transferred to the next available engineer so there is service coverage at all times. Benefits: Context Aware Mobility leverages multiple technologies to provide the most up-to-date information about the status and location of a mobile employee. When that information is dynamically and intelligently integrated with other collaborative business applications users are able to make faster, more informed decisions and increase productivity based on timely collaboration with nearby subject matter experts. The sales manager in the example above can avoid wasting time coordinating communications and efficiently resolve the issue at hand by relying on the automated integration of real-time location and presence information enabled by the Cisco Context Aware Mobility solution. Education: Business Problem: Today s generation of college students are highly familiar with consumer social networking applications that allow them to use Wi-Fi mobile devices to communicate with a buddy list of frequent contacts. These students expect to benefit from the same mobile experience while on a college campus. Many colleges and universities are leveraging their investment in a wireless LAN to offer advanced technologies such as presence applications for social networking to attract the latest generation of students. While the depth and range of features offered by these solutions must appeal to students, they must also deliver value to the underlying operational processes of the institution as well. Solution: The Context Aware Mobility solution offers open integration with a wide variety of mobile communication and collaboration applications that students find appealing. While coordinating an impromptu pizza night on campus using a presence-based buddy list is convenient, when final exams approach a much higher value might be placed on the ability to locate and collaborate with other students who are working on the same study problems or arranging an impromptu study session with other available students that are in proximity. When integrated with unified communications applications, Context Aware Mobility can provide students with real-time location, presence and messaging capabilities such as sending a text message alert to members of a study group when other members have Cisco Context Aware Presence Applications Solution Overview Page 6
entered the same library or study hall they are in. Chokepoint technology could be used to indicate when they have entered the building which would automatically change their presence status and trigger a text message or an invitation to a chat session to be sent to identified members in the group to determine if they would like to meet. On another scale, Context Aware Presence capabilities can also assist campus staff and emergency teams during natural disasters or emergency situations by enabling integrated collaboration and context aware services that can keep these teams informed about the status of events in their location such as a safety lock down of buildings in one area of the campus due to an intruder. Benefits: Presence applications enable mobile users to coordinate information and activities based on the real-time contextual data available about the environment and resources around them. Higher education institutions can use this solution to integrate with popular social networking applications that appeal to prospective students. By combining location and application information over the campus wireless network, sophisticated policy definitions, event triggers, alerts and rules that drive context aware services can be offered to enhance collaboration and operational processes for a variety of users. The solution can locate and identify defined groups of people faster and provide instant notification of proximity and availability status to better coordinate collaborative sessions among students and staff. Additionally as safety and emergency event coordination are always primary concerns for educational institutions, presence capabilities integrated with context awareness can also provide network visibility and accurate, reliable communication pathways to facilitate efficient operational processes in emergency situations. FOR MORE INFORMATION For more information about the Cisco Context-Aware Mobility solution, visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/contextaware To learn more about Cisco customers who have deployed the Cisco Context-Aware Mobility solution, visit: http://www.cisco.com/en/us/products/ps6386/prod_case_studies_list.html As a Cisco partner, find more information on the Cisco open API at: http://www.cisco.com/cgibin/dev_support/access_level/product_support For more information about the Cisco Mobility Services Engine, visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/mse For more information about the Cisco Unified Wireless Network, visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/wireless Cisco Context Aware Presence Applications Solution Overview Page 7