In the meantime, I’ve been reviewing the pieces of UCMA by reading Joe Calev’s blog. If you are new to UCMA I would recommend checking it out; Joe has a lot of detailed posts on UCMA 1.0 and a new series on UCMA 2.0 that is underway.

I hope to post updates with the material I learn over the next two days as quickly as I can, so stay tuned!

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.

The hands-on labs were divided into two sets depending on your interest: IT professional labs for learning about various deployment and administration scenarios for OCS and its roles, as well as and developer professional labs for developers to experiment with the various APIs (excluding the UCC API). As you can probably guess, I participated only in the developer labs. Unfortunately there was not enough to time to complete all of the labs, but the proctors allowed us to take copies of the lab manuals so we could use them later on. The three APIs I tinkered with were the OC SDK, the UCMA, and the UC AJAX SDK. My impressions? I definitely am not a fan of the AJAX SDK—it is a bit of a pain to have to type out all the XML to communicate with the CWA server role. The OC SDK and the UCMA are higher-level abstractions which are fairly easy to use. But after two days of learning about these APIs I have enough understanding to be able to build more effective applications, which I believe was the point of the code camp.

The last session I attended was a panel on planning voice architecture and deployment in Microsoft OCS; it turned out to a great opportunity to hear common deployment and administration concerns on a melange of topics like OCS interoperability with products from other vendors, 64-bit support, and Windows Server 2008 support.

Overall, Interact 2008 was a fantastic event, ripe with opportunity for everyone who attended. Through these blog posts I have highlighted the sessions themselves, but I didn’t talk much about the many connections that both of us have made through the event, who will be invaluable as develop and deploy OCS at Extend Health later this year. The conference was well worth the effort, and I will likely attend next year’s Interact as well.

The closing event was in a live music venue called Anthology, located in the Little Italy district of San Diego. As always, I’ll let the pictures do the talking (toward the bottom), but I’ll say that there are few things better than watching the Interact 2008 attendees performing karaoke.

The Dock Behind the Sheraton

Anthology

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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

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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.

The rest of the day was filled with a variety of sessions on OCS, OC, Exchange, and various other topics. Here are the choices I made:

• Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 Internals and Troubleshooting (Nikhil Bobde, Sam Bedekar)

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 offers the rich client experience and brings together all exciting features that are part of the our [sic] UC offering. Understand the internals of how OC 2007 is built and the various technologies behind it. This session would cover how the client ties together the information from a variety of servers (OCS, MCUs, Edge servers, mediation server, exchange, AD and a host of other web services) to built [sic] the compelling UC scenarios. The session will cover deployment and setup of Office communicator clients and also the integration of OC into other office clients and SPS. We will walk through how to troubleshoot the most common errors/failures seen by the end user in OC UX and quickly pin point the source of failure. The session would help the attendees to gain some valuable insight into the overall client architecture.

• Setup and Configuration Automation for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (Thomas Theiner)

The planning, preparation and rollout of a system like Office Communications Server with its many components is a challenging project. Learn about the different parts and tools you can use to make this easier.

• Advanced Validation and Troubleshooting for OCS 2007 (Byron Spurlock, Tom Laciano)

OCS 2007 troubleshooting is to provide the person(s) involved in deploying OCS an in depth insight to the tools that are available and articulate when, where, and how to use them. Leveraging the right tools and knowing what to look for can expedite troubleshooting immensely. We will take a deep dive into logs, validation tools, and diagnostic reports to view the environment from a core level. The following are just a few of areas that we will take a look at in the session: Federation issues, external users not able to connect to the internal environment, validation of the correct ports needed for remote and internal access for Voice, Video, Web Conferencing, and IM functions.

My choices may seem a bit strange knowing that I’m more of a developer than a network administrator, but I have to say that being out of my comfort zone was a great learning experience about the OCS and OC infrastructures. The troubleshooting sessions were the most helpful for me because the speakers discussed the exact steps to take when diagnosing problems both in Office Communicator and in OCS itself. Being able to recognize the problems that come up in this environment as well as knowing how to handle them is invaluable from the developer’s point-of-view, partly because the business side does not usually see the difference between the front-end components like the IVR and CRM application and the back-end servers which comprise the OCS infrastructure.

The session on the automated configuration of OCS was not as useful to me; it is interesting to know how to do it, but it’s probably not a scenario I will come up against soon.

For the closing event, Microsoft planned a night of beachside entertainment at the San Diego Wave House. I had a great time, even though I did not try to surf. (Mark did though!) It was the first time I’d been to the beach in a ong time, too. Here are some shots from the event.

The Pub World Pavilion

The Wave House

Sunset at the Beach

The Beach

Mark Surfing

The Pros at "Bruticus Maximus"

References

1. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/gurdeep/default.mspx
2. https://www.interact08.com/abstracts.aspx

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• Day 2
• Day 3

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.