Let’s begin with a quick glimpse into a typical day at a company:

There you are at your desk, wanting to talk with your colleague Steve in another office about a new project you need his help on. You turn to your laptop, switch to a software program, and look at Steve’s presence info. The little bubble next to Steve’s name is green, indicating he is there and available. Next to his name is also a status message that says “In the office today.”

Rather than calling Steve immediately, you send him an instant message (IM) with the text, “Hi. Can I call you?” He replies, “Sure.” You hit the Call button. The softphone on your laptop gets connected to the phone on his desk and you’re talking. He asks if you want to do video, and since you do, you both hit a Video button and you’re suddenly looking at each other. While explaining the project to him, you send him a PowerPoint slide deck through the file transfer part of your software clients.

Steve mentions that the project sounds like something he worked on before and pastes the URL to his older project in your IM chat window. As the call goes on, you decide you want to show him a demo of the project and proceed to launch a screen sharing session.

Steve asks you some more questions, to which you say you’ll have to get back to him after the call. You both talk for a while more and then you end your call. You go back to your notes, dig up the answers to the questions Steve asked, and write them up in your IM chat session. He responds by thanking you and saying he’s looking forward to helping.