Can you do this? Presence Everywhere

One of the pitfalls I constantly remind myself about is something called "The Curse of Knowledge" from Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Very simply the concept is : The more familiar you become with something, the worse you become at communicating it to someone else because you assume others already have your knowledge.  We use Office2010 every day and sometimes we forget that features we take for granted are not universally adopted or understood.

Presence everywhere definitely falls into this category for me - it is much much more that just Instant messaging, its a feature so integral to the way I and others work that when I dont have it I feel like I am nowhere near as productive.  Communicating with people forms the core of how I get my work done, and being able to communicate quickly and effectively means I am more productive.  My presence is updated constantly and automatically based on what I'm doing, and others know whether its OK to IM/Voice/Video or whether I'm busy and they can set a flag to see when I'm available.  Contrast that to cold-calling someone or blindly emailing : did you ever have an out of office message or automated voicemail that solved a problem for you? Me neither.

With presence everywhere, my key contacts always know how to reach me, regardless of whether its a work or personal matter.  I retain control of that presence so I can decide who can interrupt me or not.  Its probably one of the most powerful advances in productivity I've seen over the last 5 years, yet most customers dont have access to it.  Thats why I remind myself all the time to show how powerful a concept it is...and its not just me : https://lync.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/videos.aspx?SessionID=1

With Office365 Lync Online, you can build enterprse presence into your productivity too for under CAD$2.50 per user per month, and it will integrate with on premise deployments of Exchange and Sharepoint.