Over at the Windows Live Agents blog they we just announced the general availability of the WL Agents Visual Studio SDK.
I really like Agents because they are a different way for you to connect with your customer base. You can define the conversation flow; the engine understands questions and breaks down to the intent; then you can query your back end systems – providing a fun, interesting way for customers to connect with you.
Links: SDK | SDK Documentation | Partner Hosted Infrastructure | Development Blog | MSDN Forum
Visual Studio SDK We will be retiring the old standalone Colloquis SDK (versions 4.3 and previous) within 90 days of our 5.0 release. The process by which you take your previously developed projects and update them will be discussed with our release notes, but we want to ensure that developers have Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Standard (or above) prior to the release of our Agents plug-in. Please subscribe to Alerts on our blog page for availability of the SDK as we will be posting the announcement there. Partner Hosting Infrastructure (PHI) We are streamlining the process by which projects can be hosted within Microsoft, if you choose to be hosted with us. The old method of contacting a project manager within Microsoft will be replaced with our PHI system. Within PHI, you will be submitting your Agents through an automated system, receiving status on your project, and administering all your projects through a single console. Hosting of your Agent will require a nominal yearly fee that offsets hardware costs. We will be updating folks on the pricing model in the near future on our blog and through Windows Live development announcements, but it’s likely you’ll be able to waive these hosting fees if you are working with an MSN Market. Microsoft will only host Agents that are developed within the languages that are supported by the SDK (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese; Portuguese and Dutch will release in the next few months). Agent Provisioning As part of the ongoing safety for our end-users, the ability to have a Windows Live ID provisioned as an Agent will require that the Windows Live Agent SDK is used for development of your Agent. The previous method of submitting through Windows Live Gallery is no longer supported and will soon be removed from the system all together. Provisioning an Agent lifts the limit of contacts within Windows Live Messenger, but will be enforced strictly to ensure our Platform is in use. Compliance The Windows Live Agents SDK is now enforcing Policy Compliance in all responses from an Agent hosted by Microsoft. What this means to you as a developer is that your Agent may not respond with the exact text that you had scripted during your development. When an Agent is hosted by Microsoft, we’ll have an additional set of tools that runs against your code to ensure that the response is appropriate for any and all users of Messenger. We are holding our developers to the highest standards in online safety and will be posting blog entries on how you can safeguard your code within the SDK prior to Windows Live hosting. You will be able to easily mimic the production conversation during development with these tools, so you can be sure your Agent is compliant with online safety guidelines. If you are working with an MSN Market or Microsoft product, you will be hosted by Microsoft and subject to these tools. Self-Hosting As you are downloading the new SDK, you may run this free version with your production Agent, in your own environment. There are limitations on sessions within this self-host model, as well as some other limitations in terms of high availability deployments, but it is almost exactly the same product as we would host for you through PHI. This is an ideal setup for the smaller development teams that do not have SLA’s on their Agent and wish to prototype features. We have found this scenario to easily handle a large percentage of Agent traffic in the field today. Again, this model enforces that the Agent SDK is in place to connect to Messenger as a provisioned Agent.
We will be retiring the old standalone Colloquis SDK (versions 4.3 and previous) within 90 days of our 5.0 release. The process by which you take your previously developed projects and update them will be discussed with our release notes, but we want to ensure that developers have Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Standard (or above) prior to the release of our Agents plug-in. Please subscribe to Alerts on our blog page for availability of the SDK as we will be posting the announcement there.
We are streamlining the process by which projects can be hosted within Microsoft, if you choose to be hosted with us. The old method of contacting a project manager within Microsoft will be replaced with our PHI system. Within PHI, you will be submitting your Agents through an automated system, receiving status on your project, and administering all your projects through a single console. Hosting of your Agent will require a nominal yearly fee that offsets hardware costs. We will be updating folks on the pricing model in the near future on our blog and through Windows Live development announcements, but it’s likely you’ll be able to waive these hosting fees if you are working with an MSN Market. Microsoft will only host Agents that are developed within the languages that are supported by the SDK (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese; Portuguese and Dutch will release in the next few months).
As part of the ongoing safety for our end-users, the ability to have a Windows Live ID provisioned as an Agent will require that the Windows Live Agent SDK is used for development of your Agent. The previous method of submitting through Windows Live Gallery is no longer supported and will soon be removed from the system all together. Provisioning an Agent lifts the limit of contacts within Windows Live Messenger, but will be enforced strictly to ensure our Platform is in use.
The Windows Live Agents SDK is now enforcing Policy Compliance in all responses from an Agent hosted by Microsoft. What this means to you as a developer is that your Agent may not respond with the exact text that you had scripted during your development. When an Agent is hosted by Microsoft, we’ll have an additional set of tools that runs against your code to ensure that the response is appropriate for any and all users of Messenger. We are holding our developers to the highest standards in online safety and will be posting blog entries on how you can safeguard your code within the SDK prior to Windows Live hosting. You will be able to easily mimic the production conversation during development with these tools, so you can be sure your Agent is compliant with online safety guidelines. If you are working with an MSN Market or Microsoft product, you will be hosted by Microsoft and subject to these tools.
As you are downloading the new SDK, you may run this free version with your production Agent, in your own environment. There are limitations on sessions within this self-host model, as well as some other limitations in terms of high availability deployments, but it is almost exactly the same product as we would host for you through PHI. This is an ideal setup for the smaller development teams that do not have SLA’s on their Agent and wish to prototype features. We have found this scenario to easily handle a large percentage of Agent traffic in the field today. Again, this model enforces that the Agent SDK is in place to connect to Messenger as a provisioned Agent.
I’ll be presenting at reMIX SEA – one thing which surprised me is the first time I hit the site I saw my face in the promotional content, scary.
Shoot me an SMS, give me a call on +66 8 17139771 (my $3 Thai prepaid SIM card), twitter to me (@anguslogan) if you want to catch up – the conference is at the Bangkok Convention Centre.
I’ll be in Bangkok until Friday afternoon if you want to catch up and talk shop.
(all the sharepoint readers who never unsubscribed will appreciate this)
Arpan Shah is still the man. He runs the tech product management team for SharePoint Technologies.
He recently posted about Live Mesh and how he loves it – in fact he tries to spin a bit of People Ready Business (work the way you want to work) into his post and hooks up some Software + Services :)
friend of mine, Aakash Kambuj, is a senior developer on the Mesh team. For the last few weeks he has been pressing me to try out the Mesh Technical Preview - something he has been working on for quite some time now. So just a few days ago, I gave it a shot -- and boy, was I blown away. Mesh is absolutely fantastic. I'm using it on my work machine & home machine to keep my "My Documents" (800 MB) folder in sync. In fact, I'm able to "connect" (remote desktop) into my work machine from outside the firewall from my home machine without having to VPN in. I can also access any piece of content in the "My Documents" folder from anywhere with a browser. It's all stored in the cloud. Mesh allows you to work the way you want to work... and gives you access to all your data no matter where you are. Unlike other cloud solutions where all the information is stored in the cloud, the performance is great b/c the content is on your device (in this case, on your computer). It's the best of client + services. Mesh is very much like Groove and it's no surprise that Ray Ozzie led this team. :-)
friend of mine, Aakash Kambuj, is a senior developer on the Mesh team. For the last few weeks he has been pressing me to try out the Mesh Technical Preview - something he has been working on for quite some time now. So just a few days ago, I gave it a shot -- and boy, was I blown away. Mesh is absolutely fantastic. I'm using it on my work machine & home machine to keep my "My Documents" (800 MB) folder in sync. In fact, I'm able to "connect" (remote desktop) into my work machine from outside the firewall from my home machine without having to VPN in. I can also access any piece of content in the "My Documents" folder from anywhere with a browser. It's all stored in the cloud.
Mesh allows you to work the way you want to work... and gives you access to all your data no matter where you are. Unlike other cloud solutions where all the information is stored in the cloud, the performance is great b/c the content is on your device (in this case, on your computer). It's the best of client + services. Mesh is very much like Groove and it's no surprise that Ray Ozzie led this team. :-)
today was a really interesting day, I presented at MIX Essentials in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur) at the Limkokwing University campus in the multimedia super corridor.
Presenting in Malaysia is quite fun – just before you think the conference is going to start you need to go down to the main entrance of the facility;
there are drummers and red carpet and lots of other people there, you walk down the red carpet with the other honored guests for many photo opportunities;
when you get to the end you need to sign your name on the “welcome” sign and get a nice flower pinned to your chest, then another photo opportunity;
The next part is the pre-conference tour (i had to test the 3G wifi replacement so i didn’t go) – at the Limkokwing University all the other presenters went on a tour, i thought it was a small tour but it went for about 30 minutes; touring all the interesting history at the university; this actually made the conference start 30 minutes late – I thought people were talking about time being flexible in Malaysia.
You get to the main hall where the guests have been waiting for a long time, everyone is announced by the MC and the presenters walk down the red carpet through the audience and everyone is clapping.
The opening address by the local representative is very informative and took about 25 minutes and then the next presenter is announced with a full bio read over microphone.
After the welcome address the most senior person from the primary organizations (Microsoft and the university) do a gift exchange, and then all speakers are called on stage for another photo opportunity.
the last interesting thing is even though it started late, it will be ending near on time – why? because there were 0 breaks. from 0945-1345 there are no breaks;
this is a long time to be sitting down the front on the sofas in the middle of the room as an honored guest.
It was a really surreal experience – I’ve never walked the red carpet before but now I’m hooked :)
Over @ liveside, John O’Brien posted about the new VE ASP.NET control – it allows ASP.NET developers to easily drag and drop a VE map onto the canvas and then interact with it, 0 JavaScript – sweeet!
This thing is smart, you can use clientside extenders to not even write code behind, or you can put buttons in a UpdatePanel (ASP.NET Ajax) and those commands are translated into JS commands.
We hope to release this soon but right now some of the info is here.
I was quite surprised this post which essentially has no body or real title got aggregated to techmeme.
enough said.
When I was in Australia I did a phone interview with Ashley Clark – below are a few snippets but head over to IT News to read the full article.
The bulk of the interview was about Data Portability and what’s cooking in the Windows Live Platform.
Microsoft is allowing its Windows Live customers to consolidate their contact lists across different web sites with the release of Windows Live Contacts API. When featured on a website, Windows Live Contacts API allows the 400 million Windows Live customers to integrate their contacts, including their Hotmail, Messenger, and Mobile contacts, with the specific site. “We thought ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could use [Window Messenger] on different websites?’” said Angus Logan, senior technical product manager for Microsoft “When I sign into Facebook, for example, why do I need to manually re-enter all of my friends from Messenger or Hotmail?" … “My team’s mission in life is, instead of Microsoft just dealing with the consumer, we want other people to be able to do the dealing as well.” “Lots and lots of websites were already taking this information. They were already saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you invite your friends from Gmail or Hotmail?’ But the way they were doing that was very dangerous,” he said. “They were basically asking people for their user names and passwords, and then they were illegitimately accessing the services... they were either manually sucking the data off the screen, or accessing programmatic endpoints that they weren’t allowed to be accessing.”
Microsoft is allowing its Windows Live customers to consolidate their contact lists across different web sites with the release of Windows Live Contacts API.
When featured on a website, Windows Live Contacts API allows the 400 million Windows Live customers to integrate their contacts, including their Hotmail, Messenger, and Mobile contacts, with the specific site. “We thought ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could use [Window Messenger] on different websites?’” said Angus Logan, senior technical product manager for Microsoft
“When I sign into Facebook, for example, why do I need to manually re-enter all of my friends from Messenger or Hotmail?"
…
“My team’s mission in life is, instead of Microsoft just dealing with the consumer, we want other people to be able to do the dealing as well.”
“Lots and lots of websites were already taking this information. They were already saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you invite your friends from Gmail or Hotmail?’ But the way they were doing that was very dangerous,” he said.
“They were basically asking people for their user names and passwords, and then they were illegitimately accessing the services... they were either manually sucking the data off the screen, or accessing programmatic endpoints that they weren’t allowed to be accessing.”
If you are in Kuala Lumpur and want to catch up to talk WL Platform - SMS my cell +1 425 753 7987 or email me (alogan @ removethis .microsoft.com).
I’m meeting lots of customers/partners and also presenting at the reMIX essentials event.
This show should be fun, one of the other presenters (Leon Brown) does strike a close resemblance to Ali G - will he throw in some Ali G-isms isn’t his presentations?
There has been a lot of coverage on the announcement that book search functionality being retired from Live Search:
Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes.
Tafiti search visualization is running on 2 different sites – www.tafiti.com (the original + Halo skins) which is the “production” version – it uses book search;
the other tafiti site – tafiti.mslivelabs.com which uses the Windows Live Messenger Library does a business search instead of book search.
Because book search is winding down we’ll remove this functionality from Tafiti as soon as we get a chance.
Just a reminder that all the Tafiti (with messenger library) source code is available at http://codeplex.com/wlquickapps
Michael Kordahi (DelicateGenius) posted a wrap up here
You can also check out the opening of the keynote done by Mark Pesce (Futurist, Inventor, Panelist, something else – can’t remember) over here (or below).