Today was my first day attending VON. It was a workshop day, and I attended the SIP Tutorial Workshop that was presented by Henry Sinnreich and Alan Johnston. Henry Sinnreich works in Internet Communications Architecture at Adobe Systems. Alan Johnston works as a Consulting Member of Technical Staff at . Alan has had a hand in the writing of the standard RFC (Request for Comment) documentation for SIP (the Session Initiation Protocol).
The workshop started out a little slow in the first hour, but it progressed very quickly from the introduction and basic definition of SIP-based communications to the discussion of current IETF initiatives to create peer-to-peer applications. SIP is a connection initiation protocol that is fast becoming the standard for voice communications. SIP has the potential to be much more than just another telephone thing. SIP can control ad hoc video conferencing, IM and quite a few others. So how successful could a P2P telephony application be anyway? Well, have you ever heard of Skype?
Skype is a completely proprietary mechanism for IM, voice, and video. They hide their magical stuff that allows communication to occur, but it is in fact all peer to peer. There was much talk about how the protocol actually would work in a p2p environment. I won't bore you with the technical details, but if you are interested here is a partial list of cited references from the 8 hour session. This list is in no particular order.
- Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), RFC 3261
- Session Description Protocol (SDP), RFC 2327
- Real Time Protocol, RFC 3550, RFC 3551, and RFC 3611.
- NAT Behavioral Requirements for UDP
After spending the entire day in workshop, I attended the panel discussion on SIP Trunking at the end of the session where I heard something that really caught my attention. The moderator asked the panel where they expected SIP technology to be in 5 years. The most interesting prediction ironically came from typically traditional PBX solution provider Avaya. Avaya was represented by Anne L. Coulombe who works on their SIP strategies. She predicts that in 5 years there will be a social networking aspect to this technology.
This prediction really resonated with me. I was immediately brought back to an ITS white paper that was recently released 7 Things You Need to Know about Facebook Applications. This white paper was a joint effort between Teaching and Learning with Technology and the University Libraries. The Penn State Libraries have released a Facebook application that basic search features of the Libraries' catalog.
I pose this question today rather than in 5 years. Why not enable social networking and SIP today for Penn State? Conceptually, we could create a Penn State specific voice, video, and IM SIP application that is used through Facebook. Does anyone want to give it a try?
Day 2 here I come!
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