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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
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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.
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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
Application and
Management
Cisco Wireless
Control System
Cisco Mobility Services
Engine
Open API
Si
Si
Network
Cisco Wireless
LAN Controller
Wi-Fi TDOA
Receiver
Cisco Aironet
Access Point
TDoA
Chokepoint 125 kHz
Tag and
Devices
Cisco Compatible Tags
Cisco Compatible Tags
Wi-Fi Devices
The different components of the Cisco Context-Aware Mobility Solution needed to enhance presence and other
unified applications include:
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• 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.
.
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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
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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
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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
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