Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-saraswat-presenceprotocol-00.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 05 Mar 1999 17:10:42 -0500

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title		: The Presence Protocol
	Author(s)	: V. Saraswat, J. Malcolm, C. Apple
	Filename	: draft-saraswat-presenceprotocol-00.txt
	Pages		: 13
	Date		: 04-Mar-99
	
       The Presence Protocol is designed to maintain presence
       information about a potentially large number of online users
       connected through various Points of Presence (PoPs), and
       belonging to several Federations (which are collections of
       uniformly administered entities).  The Presence Protocol
       meets several of the requirements for a Presence Information
       Protocol [PIP-Req] in a simple, direct fashion. (Issues
       around security of messages are deliberately excluded from
       this draft.)
 
       The Presence Protocol is related to the [PIP-Demo] protocol.
       It differs from it in introducing a notion of Points of
       Presence, mediating between the Presence Server and user
       agents (clients) and specifys a mechanism for a user to
       control the dissemination of their own presence information.
       It is substantially simpler, doing away with leases (in
       favor of pings), eliminating redirections, and eliminating
       the dependence on an HTTP-style transport protocol. Further,
       it leaves for a separate protocol, the Messaging Protocol,
       the task of defining how Instant Messages should be
       communicated between points of presence.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-saraswat-presenceprotocol-00.txt

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP. Login with the username
"anonymous" and a password of your e-mail address. After logging in,
type "cd internet-drafts" and then
	"get draft-saraswat-presenceprotocol-00.txt".

A list of Internet-Drafts directories can be found in
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html 
or ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1shadow-sites.txt

Internet-Drafts can also be obtained by e-mail.

Send a message to:
	[email-masked].
In the body type:
	"FILE /internet-drafts/draft-saraswat-presenceprotocol-00.txt".
	
NOTE:	The mail server at ietf.org can return the document in
	MIME-encoded form by using the "mpack" utility.  To use this
	feature, insert the command "ENCODING mime" before the "FILE"
	command.  To decode the response(s), you will need "munpack" or
	a MIME-compliant mail reader.  Different MIME-compliant mail readers
	exhibit different behavior, especially when dealing with
	"multipart" MIME messages (i.e. documents which have been split
	up into multiple messages), so check your local documentation on
	how to manipulate these messages.

Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader
implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
Internet-Draft.