Feature
A green dot tells you about this second. Work happens next Thursday.
Hybrid working turned a question nobody used to ask into one that gets asked every morning, usually in a chat message to the whole team, usually about a week that somebody has already planned.
Why it matters
Availability is a planning problem, not a status problem.
Presence indicators in collaboration tools answer whether somebody is at their desk right now. That is useful for deciding whether to call, and useless for deciding when to hold the workshop, whether the office will be worth coming into on Wednesday, or who can cover Friday afternoon.
So teams keep a second, unofficial answer: a spreadsheet, a recurring message, or asking. All three go stale, and none of them reaches anybody outside the team.
How it works
Per person, per half day, for the weeks ahead.
- Each person publishes their own. Office, home, away or unavailable, per morning and per afternoon. Nobody maintains it on anybody else's behalf.
- The team week collects it. One grid, everybody in the team, the whole week, readable at a glance.
- It writes to their own calendar. Each person's schedule appears in their Nextcloud Calendar, so it is visible to anyone who could already see their calendar, including people outside the team.
- Half days, because that is how work actually splits. A day is too coarse for an afternoon in the office and a morning at home.
The limits
What Presence is not.
- It is not leave management. There is no entitlement, no accrual, no approval and no balance. Marking yourself away is a statement of where you will be, not a request.
- It is not attendance tracking. Nobody is measured against it and it records intention rather than fact.
- It is not desk booking. It says somebody will be in the office. It does not say where they will sit.
Community or licensed
Presence is in the free base application, with no seat limit.
Stop asking who is in.
Presence is in the free base application, so this is one you can just install and try.