Federation
I don't choose the functional concept names; I just relay the information. This Federation has nothing to do with Star Trek. Rather, Federation denotes the ability to share Presence information with foreign systems. In this case, I'm specifically speaking of the Cisco Unified Presence systems of other companies and Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC) implementations, whether local or within another company. Inter-company communications—more appropriately named business-to-business (B2B)—rely on the existence of a data link between the networks of both entities. Of course, this design comes with its own set of concerns from security and routing perspectives.
With the CUPS 7.0 release, Cisco supports B2B capabilities for Cisco-Cisco/Cisco-MOC deployments. Once the link between the two networks is established, whether directly or via the Internet, the two systems can be configured to share Presence information and route voice calls back and forth over the network. The configuration and capabilities are a bit beyond the scope of this discussion, so I'll leave those for a future article.