Cisco Unified Presence Server

The Cisco Unified Presence Server is a critical component for delivering the full value of a Cisco Unified Communications environment. It collects information about a user's availability status, such as whether or not you are using a communications device such as a phone at a particular time. It also collects information regarding a user's communications capabilities, such as whether web collaboration or video conferencing is enabled.

Cisco Unified Presence Server enables you to deploy Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) technology to support the voice services in your enterprise environment. SIP enhances the voice network by providing a core set of behaviors for session establishment and control that can be applied in a wide array of features and services. In addition to core SIP support, Cisco Unified Presence Server uses SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) technology to support both Instant Messaging (IM) and presence.

Cisco Unified Presence Server consists of a SIP presence engine and a SIP proxy function. The presence engine collects user presence information (such as busy, idle, away, or available status) as well as user capabilities (such as the ability to support voice, video, IM, and web collaboration) and compiles the data in a repository for each user. This repository is accessed by the applications and features that each user employs. Unique user rules and privacy can be applied by each user to ensure that only authorized applications and users have access to presence information. The SIP proxy function allows for efficient and accurate routing of both presence and general SIP messaging through the enterprise.