Joe Calev's WebLog

Today I will venture outside the safe confines of Office Communications Server and discuss some quirks I have noticed with Windows services. ( Disclaimer: I am not in the Windows org so these are just my observations after some experimentation) Some of...

This is the first of a series of installments on creating applications in the latest Office Communications Server Beta. I’m sure for many of you who have glanced through the documentation, this is a tall order. OCS contains a number of API’s that each...

As most of you already know, I have two boys, ages 3 and 4. Therefore it follows naturally that we own the movie 'Cars' and have every die-cast car in the collection. I was most alarmed today when the first thing I see on CNN is one of their cars has...

Recently one of our coworkers travelled back to India for a month to get married. Obviously a vacant office for a month was just too much to pass up so we decided to fill his office from floor to ceiling with balloons. The idea of the prank was to fill...

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...

One of the many new features in Lync Server 2010 is a change to how meeting Urls are formatted. The name of this feature is "Simple Url", but in truth this this elicits a smirk from anyone on our team who has dealt with them, as simple Urls are anything...

Over time I have discussed all of the different APIs available to you in order to create Office Communications Server 2007 APIs. Today I thought I would do an overview of what's available and when you would use each one. Office Communicator API ...

In a recent post, I presented an overview of all of the different APIs available in Office Communications Server 2007. The goal of that post was to help direct developers who want to know where to start. From that post I received some feedback that this...

Today we will finally start delving into the topology document - well sort of. In the previous two days I covered the Content Management Server and how documents are defined. I also mentioned that the topology document itself is stored in the Content...

Today we will start discussing coding details of the UCMA API. First I should explain what the purpose of this API is. As I mentioned yesterday, Speech Server is built on top of UCMA. In essence, UCMA enables you to create a SIP endpoint. If you do not...

As some of you may know, foreign languages are a big hobby of mine. I currently can speak French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Italian and am slowly building up my Thai. I have already started learning some Arabic and Mandarin and hope to learn those...

With the release of the Lync Server 2010 RC yesterday, I am finally free to begin discussing all sorts of things in my head. Today I will discuss one of the most crucial parts of Lync Server 2010 - the topology. There is a huge amount of information here...

Getting a bit off subject again, I recently started playing around at home with Media Center and MCML. MCML basically allows you to create full fidelity applications using Media Center and, as I understand, is what most of the Media Center UI is created...

This post will be a bit of a departure from the regular technical track. About a month ago for my birthday my wife bought me a trip to anywhere - as long as the budget was reasonable. There are three places I would like to see before I die (which I hope...

In my UCMA blog series, I mentioned a client side API called the 'Unified Communications Client API' (UCCA). In the comments, I had several questions about what this is and how to use it. Recently, I started looking at this API in more depth and, while...

Since starting at Microsoft I have had to review a lot of code - both in code reviews and when debugging others' tests. Like most other people I have my pet peeves and nitty gritty details. For instance, instead of writing if (somevariable == null ) I...

OK, so I admit that yesterday’s post was a bit lacking in excitement. Today we are going to take the first step in UCMA coding – getting our client to sign in. If you are just joining this series, attached to this post is a .zip file of the previous day...

Today I am very happy to announce that Speech Server 2007 will support nine additional sythesizers when it ships. This will enable the creation of DTMF applications in a number of new locales throughout the world. The new languages with voices are ...

While the most ideal scenario is to only run UCMA 3.0 applications with Lync Server 2010, for many of you this is simply not possible. You may own an application that was written for UCMA 2.0 and you want to upgrade to Lync Server 2010, but the application...

Let’s be honest, UCMA 1.0, while very useful, was a bit lame. The frustrating thing about it was it opened up many new possibilities, but didn’t give you the chance to take advantage of them. You could send messages to another party, but could not determine...

At long last I have finished a post on the new DetectAnsweringMachine activity in the latest Beta. While writing this post, there were a number of things that were confusing to me so I hope this information helps. I write a post some time ago about...

I thought I would write up my experiences with microstock photography so far, for those who are interested in getting into it. I first started with the microstocks around March of last year and I started with Shutterstock, then added Fotolia, and most...

So now you've figured out where you want to go. It's time to look at a stroller for your little one(s). Since my son Eitan was born, we have owned three different double strollers and two different single strollers. The following are the pros and cons...

Recently I have spent time reading the book, Branded Customer Service and discussing different experiences based on the book. The basic premise of the book is that you need to unify your brand marketing and brand deliverance. In other words, the brand...

Shortly after my DTMF post, I was asked about the A-D keys. As I mentioned, the DTMF standard contains high and low frequency for four additional keys - named A through D. While these keys are in the standard, no current phones can simulate these keys...