The role of personal communications in distributed office environments

This paper addresses the impacts of advanced personal communications on the design of distributed office communications environments. Fast changing user demands require the integration of state-of-the-art concepts for personal communications, multimedia services, enhanced user control capabilities, and ubiquitous computing into the design of highly efficient office communication environments. We propose a personal communications support system (PCSS) designed to support personal mobility, service personalization and service interoperability in distributed multimedia environments optimized for the use in customer premises networks. The proposed system focuses on the communications aspects of reachability, privacy and enhanced customer control. The PCSS design is strongly influenced by recent research activities in the field of advanced telecommunications and distributed computer sciences, such as intelligent networks (INs) universal personal telecommunications (UPT) telecommunications management network (TMN) and electronic location technologies. The concepts presented have been developed within the BERKOM II project “IN/TMN Integration” performed at the Department for Open Communications Systems at the Technical University of Berlin for Deutsche Telekom Berkom