David DeWinter

The final day at Interact 2008 was a fitting end to the conference; for me it was definitely more mellow because there wasn’t a keynote, and I didn’t attend as many breakout sessions. On the other hand, I would be lying if I said I didn’t learn anything.

To replace the keynote the conference organizers had planned a "Birds of a Feather" sessions, small gatherings of about five to fifteen people each that focused on certain topics of discussion, such as "Mobilizing Unified Communications," "Voice Infrastructure," and "Architecting for a UC World." This morning Mark and I attended the "Blogging and Other Online Activities" group (you can probably guess why). There were a lot of great ideas floated not just about blogging, but also about other online collaboration tools like forums, wikis, and newsgroups.

The most interesting discussion was around forums, because there was a lot of debate concerning their effectiveness. I use forums for both technical and interpersonal reasons, so it was interesting to see that the issues of contention apply to both types of forums:

• They are not effective tools for finding answers to questions.

The forums at MSDN are currently the only forums that I know of that allow users to mark posts as answers. Even so, what if threads have tens or even hundreds of pages? It is not easy to sift through that much content just to find an answer to your question. The forum and thread format, however, does facilitate general discussion threads, but with large threads it’s still not easy to keep track of all that’s been said.

• Put up an FAQ list? Nobody reads it.

One thing I’ve noticed in both sets of forums is that nobody reads the FAQ. Most people just rush in and post because they want their question to receive special attention (maybe that means their question will be answered more quickly?). One brilliant idea I heard that combats this approach and steers more focus toward the FAQ is for moderators to delete threads that ask questions that are already in the FAQ.

Afterwards, I headed to the Developer Code Camp, where Paul Robicheaux presented the basics of the UCMA and Albert Kooiman did a short demo of Speech Server 2007’s capabilities. I was already familiar with Speech Server 2007, but it was very valuable to understand the purpose of the UCMA and how developers could utilize it (which I discussed yesterday). The code camp at this conference was a little rushed to cover all of the APIs we wanted to, but there was still time before the close of the conference to get hands-on experience with the APIs in the hands-on lab area.

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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.

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The first day of Interact 2008 was a superb opening to the conference. The day started with a keynote from Gurdeep Singh Pall, who is the "corporate vice president in the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft Corp. He is responsible for vision, product strategy and R&D for Microsoft’s Unified Communications including voice over Internet protocol (VoIP)."¹ From there we had the opportunity to attend "breakout sessions," seminars led by Microsoft employees or MVPs on abstruse topics for OCS, Office Communicator (OC), and Exchange, or participate in hands-on labs—exercises also related to OCS, OC, and Exchange, aimed at developers and IT professionals.

Gurdeep’s keynote stressed three points. The first was the future of software communications. Telephony is an industry that has been dominated by hardware, and the evolution of communication systems has traditionally coincided with the evolution of phones. However, what about other means of communication such as email and IM? It is becoming apparent that software has a place in the communication industry; some would even argue that it plays a major role. By building a platform for software developers to build off in the unified communications area, Microsoft’s UC solution brings the focus away from the presence of a machine (such as a phone or a laptop) to the presence of a human being.

Gurdeep went on to explain his own version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (called Gurdeep’s Hierarchy of Needs) which addresses the needs of telecom managers. The four lower levels of the pyramid were needs analogous to Maslow’s deficiency needs. If you have them, you don’t think about them; for example, you don’t go around the office exclaiming that you have email—similarly, you don’t think about physiological needs if you have met them. The point was that once the deficiency needs are met, you can self-actualize, which encourages spontaneity and creativity for innovating solutions to business problems.

Finally, Gurdeep discussed the perspective that Microsoft brings to the UC table—moving IT into the "business zone" using three core concepts:

• Interoperate (1 + 1 = 2)

Previously, the model for UC has been vertically integrated communications, where vendors offer their own stack of technologies to provide a comprehensive telephony solution. Microsoft wants to turn that model on its side by identifying various layers of telephony (hardware, software, devices, etc.) for which multiple vendors can offer a number of different solutions. Microsoft knows it can make advances by providing a software platform which can interoperate with existing vendors’ hardware and devices. This model will allow for industry- and enterprise-specific development and innovation—in essence, self-actualization.

• Integrate (1 + 1 = 3)

Whereas interoperability is about making sure your platform is compatible with other platform, integration is about achieving synergy across disparate systems in an architecture. At this point, Gurdeep let Albert Kooiman and members of Clarity Consulting to demonstrate how they developed a pilot project which integrated their CRM application with the presence and communication features within Office Communicator and OCS. (This sort of integration is also what we are very attracted to for our own telephony solution.)

• Impact

Sometimes it’s about more than just ROI. (And I’m sure some of you will disagree.) Gurdeep played a video about children at St. Luke’s Hospital who are getting a second chance at school and education through Microsoft RoundTable. There is an abridged article about the story here.

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Mark and I flew into San Diego tonight, and wow, if you’ve never been here, prepare for some really beautiful scenery! Unfortunately I didn’t get much of a chance to take pictures outside, but I did once we got inside the "Pub World" pavilion. The first night here was phenomenal—I have never been to a Microsoft event like this before, but I am really impressed at the execution.

The event tonight was a chance for people to just get together and enjoy the evening. The pavilion had XBOX360 (Halo and some other games I didn’t recognize), pool, darts (!), air hockey, foosball, ping pong, shuffleboard, and of course, a huge screen showing the NCAA finals. Here are some photos from the event.

Here’s to another great day tomorrow!

Recently my blog posts have focused on Visual Studio Extensibility, but the challenges that I have come up against at work involve vastly different technologies. One of these is in the Unified Communications space, where my team and I recently investigated the feasibility of using Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) in a contact center space. During this pilot project, I helped Ryan Hauert develop a front-end client (a scaled-back CRM application) that utilized the UCC API to interact with OCS. I also created an ACD that linked that front-end client with an IVR workflow built by Bek Yakvalkhodjiev against Speech Server 2007. Instead of using a queue to manage call routing, I used a prototype version of the algorithm that Mark Stafford explains here. The entire project took about three weeks, and that includes the time it took for all of us to learn the APIs and to set up the sandbox environment where OCS was hosted. The results were very fruitful not just for our team, but for the company as a whole to see what Microsoft has to offer versus its competitors in the UC space.

The reason I bring this up is because Mark and I will be heading to Microsoft’s Interact 2008 conference tomorrow in San Diego, California. This will be a fantastic opportunity not only to learn more about what Microsoft is bringing to the table, but also to make valuable connections with other people interested in OCS who are potentially going through the same evaluation that we are right now! If you’re interested in the contact-center-building facet of OCS and are heading to Interact ‘08, feel free to drop me a line through my blog or through my email.