OK, this may be old news to many of you out there, but the Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit just shipped. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet but you can be sure I will. I hope to receive a free copy of it at an internal event next month, at which time I also hope to sign up to contribute...

There are some product architectures created here at Microsoft that I am marvelled at with their simplicity, ease of use, and power. Unfortunately, I do not find WMI to be one of those architectures. With hope, some day we will have a sane replacement for WMI but in the meantime we still need to deal...

In yesterday's post, I discussed how knowledge of where the WMI provider retrieves its data is important when querying it. Today I thought I would provide a list of the WMI classes and where the data comes from for each. If you perform a lot of WMI querying in OCS, this list may be helpful. Note that...

As many of you are likely aware, Office Communications Server (and previous versions) make use of WMI for storing various pieces of data. You can find details of the WMI classes that currently ship with OCS 2007 here . While this gives helpful information about what types of classes and properties are...

I have seen a lot of questions lately asking how one can add presence to a communications application. There are a number of ways to do this, but I don't think we have done a great job explaining what they are. First, and perhaps what has confused people the most, there is currently no support for...

The following is more information about why each answer is correct for the quiz I presented yesterday. If you have not already taken the quiz, please skip this blog entry and go to yesterday's, then come back to this entry for any explanations. 1) To create a new conference, the client must contact...

For a little fun today, I decided to put together a little test for those who think they know Office Communications Server. Think of this as a fun little exercise that will help you learn OCS and help me learn what topics to blog about in the future. If one question boggles you, let me know and I will...

Perhaps the easiest way to extend the Communicator 2007 client is by adding extension tabs underneath the contacts section. I looked around the web and found several references that this is possible but nothing about how to do it. Recently at TechEd one of my colleagues, Kyle Marsh, demo'd how to do...

In our last bot post I wrote about creating a bot that accepts a message from Communicator and sends a response. The response logic was very crude. We simply looked for certain words in the message from the client and sent back an appropriate response. Obviously as our bot becomes more sophisticated...

After spending some time at our Unified Communications Server booth at TechEd, I decided to write the answers to some of the most common questions people had for those of you who did not have the opportunity to attend this year. What is the difference between Live Communications Server and Office...

I am currently at the TechEd conference and it has been a very rewarding experience so far. It's amazing to hear what everyone is using our product for - many of them ideas I had never thought of. It's also interesting learning about the other pieces of Office Communications Server. From the Application...

I hope my recent blog series on the UCMA API was helpful for everyone. If you would like me to cover other details please let me know. In the near future I will continue to blog about applications for UCMA. However, I would like to point out the UCMA is intended for server side applications. Granted...

Let’s say you are not sure a particular endpoint exists at a certain time, so you would like to continually retry at specific intervals or you need to refresh a connection at a certain interval. To help with this situation, the UCMA API provides the TimerWheel class. TimerWheel differs from standard...

Today we will finally revisit our client and add a little bit of code to it while discussing connection pools. For those of you familiar with concepts such as thread pools, connection pools are similar in a number of ways. Connection pools apply only to outgoing connections – not to incoming connections...

Today we will cover a message type those of you more familiar with SIP may not know much about – the SERVICE request. Before writing this post, I attempted to research this message type on the Internet without success. Finally I just decided to look at the SIP RFC and noticed that this message type is...

Today will be a short post with no changes to our server or client projects. Currently we use the SipEndpoint class to register ourselves with the Microsoft Office Communications Server and create a dialog between our client and our server. Some of you may have also noticed the SipPeerToPeerEndpoint...

I must admit that while teaching the UCMA API, I have been learning about it myself. Today, my hope was to tell you how to create a client that sends a SUBSCRIBE message to the server and then receives NOTIFY messages from it. However, as I’ll explain shortly, I ran into a small problem. For those...

We finally have all the pieces ready to get our client and server communicating. Yesterday we allowed our client and server to agree on communicating through the SIP MESSAGE message so the next step is to get our client to send a message and get our server to receive one. Let’s start with our client...

OK, so now we have a client and a server that can both sign in, create a dialog, and recognize when the other has dropped the connection. I’m sure what you’d really like to do is get them to message each other! I’m sure some of you have gone ahead and figured it out already but for the rest of us there...

You have probably already noticed that UCMA is currently a low level API. The advantage, of course, is you have a great deal of flexibility in achieving your goals. The disadvantage is it takes a bit longer to get to where you are going. Rest assured you will soon be able to send and receive messages...

Welcome to part eight of my UCMA introduction! This so far is my most ambitious blog endeavor to date and I hope what I have presented so far has been helpful. Please do send any feedback. I’d love to hear if this information has helped anyone or any requests for more information or particular problems...

Before we get to more details on sending messages, we need to talk a little more about signing out. Technically, when I had the application sign out using BeginTerminate, this wasn’t entirely correct. For those of you who have examined the SipEndpoint class, you may have noticed that there are two methods...

Yesterday as homework your job was to create a simple server that can sign in and sign out. In one view, we don’t really have a client/server in this case because both our ‘client’ and our ‘server’ are clients of the Microsoft Office Communications server. My solution to the assignment isn’t that...

So far we have a simple client that doesn’t do very much. In the next few days, we are going to add the capability for our client to send a message to Microsoft Office Communicator. We are going to do this by creating an INVITE to the Office Communicator client and then send a MESSAGE to it. If...

Yesterday we finally got into some UCMA coding – allowing our client to sign in to the OCS server. Today we will provide the functionality to sign out of the server. In our current implementation, clicking the start button changes the button to ‘stop’ but the button is still disabled. Before we...