Background

Personal/selective presence is the very essence of how SIP can play an important role in enhancing our personal and professional communications. Here's how it works...

Motivation:

It's Friday again and Alice is looking forward to the weekend because she hopes that Bob might ask her out on a date. She is expectantly waiting for his Instant Message to pop up and is looking forward to a romantic suggestion. Then Barry pops online. Barry had earlier asked her on a date and she is expecting him to Instant Message her to ask if she would like to go. Alas, although Barry is sweet, she would much rather wait for Bob because she really enjoys his company much more. She needs some "prevention" mechanism in place that will hint for Barry to wait another week in case Bob doesn't ask her out after all.

For instance, she would like to set her presence state on "Busy". But then she may convey the wrong "message" to Bob and her boss and work colleagues, since she is actually online ready to serve any incoming IM request. If only she could leave her presence state "Online" and modify it "selectively" for Barry, so only he would see "Busy" state... '-)

The feature:

The IMP (Instant Message and Presence) application will enable Alice to manually override her "Online" state with a "Busy" state only for the particular watcher Barry.

How this can be accomplished:

Figure 1 below illustrates how this can be accomplished. (Note: There could be several ways to implement this feature. However, in any of those SIP would play a major role)