Telecom Lead Asia: Business agility demands real-time collaboration and
communication between employees, partners, suppliers, and customers – in a global
context. It also demands collaboration between and beyond heterogeneous networks and services. As
enterprises deploy unified communications applications for services such as voice, video, presence,
instant messaging, conferencing, calendaring, directory, identity, and address book, the
enablement of real-time collaboration across enterprises and domains demands solutions that are
high-performance, interoperable, policy-regulated, and secure.
Interdomain Federation is secure, policy-regulated
collaboration between multiple enterprises or public domains that enables the exchange of messaging
and presence information between users. Federation is achieved by mediating between
services or across a large number of proprietary or standards-based protocols.
These domains may be in separate enterprises or represent subdomains within the
same enterprise.
Aricent’s Unified Communications (UC) Federation allows
enterprises to federate their disparate UC platforms with other enterprises to
create a new collaborative environment. This paper discusses the new enterprise
experience, in which inter-domain federation is established between multiple UC
Platforms across enterprises.
Unified Communications is becoming the solution of choice
for not only high-flying enterprises with shrinking travel budgets, but for
small and medium businesses as well. Adoption of UC in enterprises is
accelerating as more and more enterprises embrace the need for software-powered
communications beyond their network boundaries to facilitate communication and
collaboration anytime, anywhere among colleagues, vendors, and customers around
the globe. Forward-looking enterprises are deploying enterprise UC solutions to
improve communications, increase collaboration, and improve worker productivity.
A further step would be to collaborate seamlessly internally and across
corporate boundaries.
WHAT IS DRIVING SERVICE PROVIDERS TOWARDS FEDERATION?
Current UC solutions only support collaboration across a
single vendor platform that enables users to exchange presence, instant
messaging, data, voice, and video calls. As enterprises expand, they will find
it increasingly necessary to integrate their UC solutions with their vendors
and partners.
Service providers are faced with a wide range of
challenges, including:
PRESENCE INTEGRATION ACROSS PSTN/PLMN/IP NETWORKS
The need
to integrate information across IT, telephony, and mobile devices has led more and more enterprises to implement
UC. Enterprises require user presence information to be reflected across fixed,
mobile, and IP networks so that users are contacted at appropriate times. Presence federation becomes
challenging when service providers try to integrate proprietary vendor
solutions across multiple devices. The availability of diverse
enterprise systems (OCS, IBM Sametime, Google Apps, Cisco, and Jabber) and public systems (GTalk, Yahoo) poses a challenge for
information exchange between systems and creates the need for an
integrated environment.
VOICE, VIDEO, AND DATA ACROSS UC PLATFORMS
Because UC platforms support voice and video calls, users
should be able to escalate their chat sessions to voice or video
through the click of a button. Peer-to-peer and multi-party voice and
video calls, and ad hoc conferences across enterprise
boundaries, will add a new dimension to communication across diverse and
disparate UC platforms.
In addition to presence, enterprises are looking for
exchange of data between multiple UC vendor platforms, both public and enterprise. Users should be able to easily exchange
documents, images, and videos across platforms subject to security and data
model preferences. Also, enterprises need interoperable platforms that can
seamlessly integrate with their current and future IT infrastructure, thereby minimizing the risk of
platform dependency. Currently, many enterprise UC solutions use proprietary protocols, which makes the UC system very rigid.
Enterprises are demanding protocol convergence across different proprietary standards. Service providers will need to start selling
systems based on open standards like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Simple
Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol
(XMPP), and SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions
(SIMPLE) to serve a wide range of buyers.
ADDRESS BOOK, CALENDAR SHARING ACROSS ENTERPRISES
To create an approachable, collaborative, and productive environment, enterprises are looking for a federation
solution that can facilitate Enterprise Address Book and Calendar sharing with
federated partner enterprises based on their outbound information sharing
policies. Enterprise Address Book sharing allows users to quickly and easily
search for and connect with partners. Calendar sharing plays an important role
in reducing delays in communications and decision making by checking the
availability of stakeholders across enterprises before sending meeting
invitations with defined agendas.
POLICY, INFORMATION SECURITY, AND AUDIT
With partners becoming a part of the enterprise
communication network, the need for secure policy control increases.
Policy control enables users to seamlessly exchange relevant data across
other users by monitoring the policies tied up with
corresponding users. The policy control preferences define a particular user’s
ability to view the presence of other users, set up voice calls, and exchange
instant messages, documents, images, and videos across platforms. Enterprises
need to evolve their data model to protect confidentiality of information being
exchanged by imposing corresponding policy control rules. Further,
a need to audit information exchange is imperative. The ability
to monitor information exchange based on properties, file type, file size, context,
key words, and other criteria is discussed later in this document.
INTER-ENTERPRISE PRESENCE AND IM FEDERATION
Federation can enable users across multiple enterprise
platforms to share presence information with other users. Presence services not
only share standard presence states like available,” busy,” and do not
disturb,” but let users add custom status messages to share with federated
colleagues. The federated presence capabilities across multiple platforms
collect detailed information on users and report the presence statuses to
others across different enterprises. This enables users to make informed
choices about the best way to contact them. Advance presence federation enables
efficient sharing of location information in the best interest of enterprise. Federation also enables peer-to-peer and ad hoc chat
sessions across enterprise boundaries.
PRESENCE ACROSS PLMN/PSTN, IP, ANDIMS NETWORKS
A federated UC solution enables tight integration of
presence not only with the diverse UC platform, but onto users’ fixed, mobile,
or IP networks. It also reflects each user’s presence across the multiple modes
of communications.
For example, when Bob wants to talk to Denis, he checks
Denis’s unified presence information via his UC client, or on his IP phone.
Knowing Denis’s presence increases Bob’s chances of reaching him directly, as
opposed to not knowing Denis’s availability and thus being less likely to make
a successful call.
HUB-AND-SPOKE MODEL
Centralized federation is represented by a Hub-and-Spoke
model, wherein UC Federation is the hub and the supported UC platforms are the
spokes. This solution leverages reduced enterprise IT infrastructure
requirements in order to federate with partners. It is simpler to integrate
enterprise and public UC platforms with federation solutions that require
minimal maintenance, thus reducing financial and operational costs for the
enterprises.
CENTRALIZED POLICY MANAGEMENT
Policy control plays an integral part in any enterprise,
enabling efficient and effective configuration of user preferences and
capabilities. Service providers can configure policy control settings at enterprise level or at a centralized
location. Centralized policy control enables enterprises to configure settings
in one place and then apply them across multiple locations and
departments. Federation delivers policy management capabilities for
enterprises through configurable data models to define rules on how
users from one enterprise should be connected to users from
another enterprise, and the presence of each in terms of viz,
instant message sharing, voice and video call setup, data sharing, etc.
POLICY MANAGEMENT – USE CASE
A user belongs to an enterprise, which is segmented into
contactgroups. Contact groups are defined hierarchically (i.e.,
sub-contactgroup belongs to parent contact group).
In the following example, the enterprise is defined as
contact group 1, containing all employees. The two sub-contact groups 2 and 3
are defined as Marketing and Support departments.
> User A inherits from the default enterprise policies
(contact group 1)
> User B inherits from the Marketing dept. policies
(contact group 2), which overrides the default enterprise (contact
group 1) policies
> User C inherits both the Marketing dept. and Support
dept.
Policies (the union of contact groups 2 and 3), which
overridethe policies of the default enterprise (contact group 1)Company
2Company 1Company 6Company 4Company 3Company 5UC FederationCompany 2Company
1Company 6UCUCUCUCUCUCCompany 4Hub and Spoke ModelCompany 3Company 5ABCContact
Group 1 = EnterpriseContact Group 2 =Marketing Dept.Contact Group 3 =Support
Dept.
ACCESS LEVELS
Access levels provide a flexible authorization model for
enterprises/users to control the amount of presence information that others
see. For example, if a user wants to always be available to a group of selected
federated users even when busy or in a meeting, the user can assign those users
to the Team access level. In short, the user may choose to be accessible to a
select group or specific users.
POLICY MANAGEMENT – USE CASE
A user belongs to an enterprise, which is segmented into
contactgroups. Contact groups are defined hierarchically (i.e.,
sub-contactgroup belongs to parent contact group).
In the following example, the enterprise is defined as
contact group 1, containing all employees. The two sub-contact groups 2 and 3
are defined as Marketing and Support departments.
> User A inherits from the default enterprise policies
(contact group 1)
> User B inherits from the Marketing dept. policies
(contact group 2), which overrides the default enterprise (contact
group 1) policies
> User C inherits both the Marketing dept. and Support
dept. policies (the union of contact groups 2 and 3), which
overridethe policies of the default enterprise (contact group 1)
AUTOMATIC SENSING OF ACTIVITIES
With the enhanced presence model, users’ activities
across devices are automatically collected and aggregated into a presence
status selected on behalf of the user. No user input is required. For example,
a user’s presence status is set to “on a call” when that user places or
receives a call on a landline or mobile phone (assuming these devices are
defined in the user’s contacts) or to in a meeting.” As a user signs in to
Office Communicator, attends meetings, places or answers phone calls, or simply
stops interacting via phone or computer, the presence system continues to
gather information about the user’s status and distribute the information to
others.
VOICE AND VIDEO FEDERATION
Federation allows and manages policies for voice/video
chat and conferencing. Enterprise users can connect to peers in another enterprise via their UC platform and perform two-party
communication or multiparty communication. These calls involve signalling
session and media session, on top of the signalling session. UC Federation
Policy management monitors and enables such calls based on enterprise policies
and rules while media is shared directly between the enterprise users
(point-to-point).
FILE TRANSFER
File transfer is integral to the exchange of instant
messages, with users transferring documents, images, and video clips during
instant message conversations across enterprise boundaries.
The transfer is bound by enterprise policies defined in
the UC Federation Policy Manager to secure legitimate file transfers, regulate
content monitoring and filtering, and allow file transfers based on size and type – where the rules classify the
permissible file size, valid/invalid file types and
sensitive/non-sensitive file content across enterprise boundaries.
POLICIES ARE DEFINED AT VARIOUS LEVELS
> Restrict sending/receiving file transfer
capabilities of enterprise users: Policies defined in Policy Manager to enable
sending/receiving of files by the enterprise users
> Allow/restrict files transfers of defined file type:
Policies defined in Policy Manager to inspect file properties viz
and file name, title, size, type, copyright, etc.
* Allow/restrict of files sharing based on file name,
title, and copyrights
* Allow sharing files with extensions DOC, DOCX, PDF, etc., while restricting the sharing of Image files with
extensions IMG and BMP; Music files with extensions MP3 and MP4; Code files
with extensions CXX, C, and PL by users across enterprise boundaries.
* Allow/restrict file sharing with defined size limits:
Polices defined to inspect the file size limits (e.g., file size
of more than 1 GB is not allowed to be transferred across
enterprise boundaries)
> Allow/restrict file transfers with defined size
limits: Polices defined in Policy Manager to inspect the file size limits
(e.g., file size of more than 1 GB is not allowed to be transferred across
enterprise boundaries)
> Allow/restrict file transfers after content
monitoring: Rules defined in Policy Manager to inspect the file content in
order to determine if it contains sensitive information of any kind (e.g.,
intellectual property, consumer data, etc.). Once it is determined that the
file contains sensitive information, proper security action is enforced (block
file transfer or warn the user that the
action is illegitimate)
> UC Federation exposes APIs to interface with
3rd-party Content Inspection and Monitoring solutions
* To provide a powerful combined solution for secure data transfer
* Easily integrate into the existing enterprise IT
infrastructure having a Content Inspection and Monitoring solution
Whenever a policy breach is determined, a trace log is
created for the enterprise administrator to track the policy infringement at enterprise.
CONCLUSION
The federation of presence along with instant messaging,
data, voice, and video between two enterprises can eliminate a multi-day
information exchange and transform an impending crisis into a problem solved.
As the UC market matures, federation will become critical to maintaining
seamless communication across enterprises. A federated environment delivers a
simplifiedarchitecture that can enable users to overcome many of theinherent
drawbacks and challenges to day-to-day communication.Enterprises are looking
for the simplest and clearest UC integration strategies.
Federation helps enterprises create collaborative
environments that improve productivity and accelerate decision making. Whilst
the centralized federation solution also helps enterprises reduce financial and
operational costs by leveraging the centralized policy. Controlling and monitoring the traffic toward the
federation hub is contrary to the any-to-any” federations that experience high
operational and maintenance costs.
Federation eventually delivers a framework that gives
rise to a world without boundaries” where enterprises and users interact with
multiple vendors across networks and platforms.
DIVYA WAKANKAR, Product Manager , Aricent Group
