David DeWinter

The second day at Interact opened with a keynote by Terry Myerson, the Corporate Vice President of Exchange, who approached the idea of Unified Communications from the email (specifically, Exchange) perspective. The previous day’s keynote covered a lot of Terry’s points, but it was interesting to hear how the Exchange team viewed their role in Microsoft’s UC platform. Even though Exchange has Unified Messaging, the team wants to move the focus to UC, not just UM, because the business problem that Microsoft is addressing is achieving people-centric communication. Thus it follows that in any UC solution, it’s people first and tools second.

Terry then touched on the topic of interoperability, discussing how Exchange ActiveSync would be leveraged by the iPhone Enterprise edition. But perhaps the most interesting part of the presentation was the demonstration of Exchange Labs, a new program geared to test the next version of Exchange. In this inaugural rollout, its target audience is select schools and universities as part of Windows Live @ edu, allowing them to connect students, alumni, faculty, and staff through email. There were two individuals who had overseen the deployment of Exchange Labs to their respective school districts with amazing results.

Terry concluded with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson: "Every generation needs a new revolution." I personally think we are seeing great advancements in the area of unified communications—this is our revolution.

Day 2 featured more sessions that appealed to developers than the previous day, so it was right up my alley. Here are the sessions I attended:

• Microsoft Unified Communications for Developers: Building Communications into Your Applications (Albert Kooiman, Paul Robichaux)

The Microsoft Unified Communications platform enables developers to easily build secure and productivity enhancing applications atop a extensible foundation. This session will explore the concept of communications as a first class feature in Windows and Web applications through sample applications that demonstrate how to build voice, video and messaging communications into your applications along with speech and messaging based UIs. It will give an overview of the types of applications that can be built using messaging as well as software-based Voice over IP (VoIP) and will explain which APIs and SDKs are available to build those applications.

• Developing with Exchange Web Services (Paul Robichaux, Albert Kooiman)

Exchange Server 2007 introduces new Web Services APIs to integrate information stored in Exchange into line-of-business applications. Examples include calendaring applications, contact management applications, or applications that access other content from the Exchange store, like creating editing and sending messages, handling tasks or managing contacts, etc. This session gives an overview of the Exchange Web Services APIs, and focuses on specific illustrations of how to use Exchange Web Services in your line-of-business applications. This session includes walk-throughs of code examples of how to integrate data from the store into LOB applications and third party solutions.

Both sessions were very interesting as they revealed the life cycle of the current menagerie of UC APIs (UC Client API, UC Managed API, Speech Server 2007 API, UC AJAX SDK, Office Communicator SDK, and Exchange Web Services). The first session gave an overview of the different APIs and how they interoperate with each other and which APIs are appropriate for which scenarios. Here is a very simplified version of a diagram they showed.

One thing that may not be familiar to you is the Media Stack component of the architecture. Speech Server 2007 obviously needs media to be able to simulate an IVR or call workflow, but UCMA doesn’t provide those capabilities. Consequently, Speech Server is built on both UCMA and the media stack (which I believe is undocumented).

There are five different platforms on which you can decide to build your application to integrate OCS and its features like presence, audio/video, conferencing, IM, and so on. Here’s a brief summary of what each platform offers:

• Office Communicator SDK

The Office Communicator SDK is appropriate in scenarios where Office Communicator is already deployed to your end users, because the SDK is essentially a COM Automation API. You can sign in, sign out, and get contacts, groups, and presence information without exposing the OC UI, but if you actually want to initiate IM, audio, or video conversations, then using this SDK will launch the appropriate Communicator window. This is great in the case where your users are familiar with Communicator, because your application will then expose the same level of power that Communicator does with minimal development effort.

• UCC API

The Unified Communications Client API is a much lower level API than the OC SDK and should be used in client scenarios where deploying Communicator is not an option, or you want to expose everything (e.g. IM, audio, video) through your own application’s interface. It is a COM API that is wrapped with a simple PIA. Fortunately the documentation is fairly thorough, but it has a steep learning curve (especially for .NET-only developers).

• UC AJAX SDK

The UC AJAX SDK is perfect for integrating your web sites with presence and IM capabilities. As its name implies, it is an AJAX-based API, and it communicates directly with the Communicator Web Access Server role (which in turn . It is definitely tedious to craft requests (as it is all XML-based) but it is the best option at this point for web-based integration.

• UCMA

This is what the UC AJAX SDK and part of the Speech Server API rely on to do their dirty work. This API is appropriate for server-side applications to enable scenarios like message broadcasting and IM bots that can interact with end users. Contrary to popular belief, UCMA does support publishing and querying for presence, but it is a bit lower level than the rest of the API.

• Speech Server 2007

Speech Server 2007 is in its own niche area, and its goal is to provide IVR solutions for customers. It is based entirely off Windows Workflow Foundation, and there is a superb set of tools that assist you with building and debugging your IVR solutions.

The pictures today are not from an evening event (because there was none), but rather just from the day as a whole.

The Beach Near the Hotel

The Sheraton Hotel (Conference Host)

 

Terry Myerson (Right) During Keynote

Exchange Labs

The "Coffee Chat" Area

One of the Breakout Sessions

Beach at Night

Other Articles In Series

• Day 1
• Day 3

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 10:49 am and is filed under Interact 2008, Unified Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.