The PDC (10/26-10/30 in LA) is all about the future of the Microsoft Platform.
So it’s appropriate that we’re going to be showing the next generation of OCS 2007, OC 2007 and the UC Platform SDKs for the first time at the PDC.
Learn: We’ve got a lot to show in our sessions if you look under the Unified Communications tag:
Office Communications Server and Exchange: Platform Futures
- Presenters: Chris Mayo, David Ollason
- Learn how applications and services can add presence, IM, VOIP, and Video using the Unified Communications Platform. Also, see the roadmap for the future of Microsoft Unified Communications (UC) products and the new UC Platform SDKs.
Exchange Web Services Managed API: Unified Communications Development for Exchange
- Presenter: Jason Henderson
- The new Exchange Web Services Managed API provides managed code access to Exchange, whether running on premises or in the cloud. Learn how this new Microsoft .NET API provides full access to Microsoft Exchange mail, calendaring, scheduling, contacts, eventing, synchronization, permissioning, and public folders programmatically using the Exchange Web Services protocol.
Office Communications Server 2007 R2: Enabling Unified Communications
- Presenters: Oscar Newkerk, David Ollason
- Learn how UCMA 2.0 and Unified Communication Workflow Activities provide a powerful communications arsenal to build Presence, IM, and voice-enabled services that can be leveraged from any application.
We’ll have some other cool things to do after/around our sessions.
Socialize: Come to the UC booth. I’m going to be there along with the rest of the UC Platform team so we can sit down and talk about the new platform SDKs, scenarios, write some code, hit the whiteboard, whatever.
Do: If you come to our sessions and get motivated to kick the tires, we’ll have HOLs at the PDC. Do the HOLs and you’ll be the first to see/touch/use the bits publically. The UC Platform team and I will be around to answer your questions and get your feedback.
Hope to see you there.
Chris
I wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to catch some webcasts I'm delivering here in the next couple of weeks.
We're going to cover a lot of the UC dev basics and take a deeper dive on a couple of APIs. Details and registration at the links below:
6/17 - Building Software on the Unified Communications Platform
6/19 - Behind the Scenes with Office Communications Server 2007, Office Communicator 2007 and Exchange 2007
6/24 - Driving Contextual Collaboration with Office Communicator 2007
6/27 - Building Asynchronous Contextual Collaboration with Exchange Web Services
Hope to see you (virtually) there.
Chris
I had a great time at TechEd this year. Thanks to everyone that came to the UC sessions, asked great questions in the Interactive Theaters and dropped by the UC booth to talk about building communications enabled software.
It was great to have a chance to talk about what you're building, discussing scenarios you're interested in developing and hitting the whiteboard.
I got a lot of great questions while at TechEd that I'll turn into blog posts, ideas for demos, code samples, etc. but I wanted to ask one really important question.
Now what?
If you attended the UC sessions, came to the Interactive Theater or stopped by the booth for a demo and got excited about building on the UC Platform, what's on your mind now that you're back at your office?
Love to hear your thoughts!
Chris
Everyone that touches the UC products and SDK is heads down getting ready for TechEd 2008. It's going to be awesome.
First, we've great breakout sessions to show you how to build communications features into your apps, like IM, voice and video. We've also got Interactive Theatre sessions where we'll show and discuss deeper demos of what the SDKs can do (and it's pretty cool). Along with that, we've got HOLs built on top of a full OCS 2007 and Exchange 2007 environment where you can fire up Visual Studio and kick the tires.
Here's and example:
1. It takes about 10 lines of code to launch a voice call. We'll show you that code in the breakouts.
2. Adding communications like voice calls makes for some really compelling apps. We'll show you those apps and how we built them in the Interactive Theatre.
3. You'll be able to write that code in the HOLs to see the code in action.
Here are the sessions we'll have at TechEd:
|
Code |
Title |
Session Type |
Speaker(s) |
|
UNC201 |
Building Software on the Microsoft Unified Communications Platform |
BRK |
Albert Kooiman; Kirt Debique |
|
UNC302 |
Building Asynchronous Contextual Collaboration with Microsoft Exchange Web Services |
BRK |
Jason Henderson; Paul Robichaux |
|
UNC303 |
Unified Communications: Behind the Scenes with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Office Communicator 2007 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 |
BRK |
Kyle Marsh; Uma Raghavan |
|
UNC304 |
Driving Contextual Collaboration with Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 |
BRK |
Chris Mayo |
|
UNC402 |
Business Process Communications with the Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API |
BRK |
Michael Dunn |
|
UNC401 |
Building Contextual Collaboration Using the Microsoft Unified Communications Client API |
BRK |
Oscar Newkerk; Stefano Mapelli |
|
UNC306 |
Anywhere Information Access with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server |
BRK |
Albert Kooiman; Michael Dunn |
|
UNC202 |
Programming Conferencing Solutions with the Microsoft Office Live Meeting Service XML API |
BRK |
John Shriver-Blake |
|
UNC305 |
Building Contextual Collaboration Clients for the Web Using the Microsoft Unified Communications AJAX SDK |
BRK |
Rui Maximo |
|
UNC11-TLC |
I Want Unifed Communications in My Application: Tell Me How |
TLC |
Chris Mayo; Jon Rauschenberger |
|
UNC03-TLC |
Communicator Plus: A Microsoft Office Communicator Add-on by Eventure |
TLC |
Vivek Garg |
|
UNC01-TLC |
Building Mash-ups with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Web Services |
TLC |
David Claux |
|
UNC05-TLC |
Migrating Microsoft Exchange Applications to Exchange Web Services |
TLC |
David Claux; Jason Henderson |
|
UNC08-TLC |
How to Integrate Microsoft Unified Communications with the Microsoft Office System |
TLC |
Chris Mayo |
|
UNC06-TLC |
Using the Microsoft Office Communicator APIs |
TLC |
Avronil Bhattacharjee; Manisha Sahasrabudhe |
|
UNC02-TLC |
Building Alerts and Notifications Using the Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API |
TLC |
Stephane Taine |
|
UNC09-TLC |
Building an Outbound Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server Application Interacting with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Web Services |
TLC |
Albert Kooiman; Jon Rauschenberger |
|
UNC04-TLC |
The Microsoft Unified Communications Client API: Building Your Own Unified Communications Client |
TLC |
Srivatsa Srinivasan; Stefano Mapelli |
|
UNC07-TLC |
Building Bots on the Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API |
TLC |
Stephane Taine |
|
UNC10-TLC |
Integrating Presence in Your Web Application Using the Microsoft Unified Communications AJAX API |
TLC |
Rui Maximo |
To get more details on our sessions, got to https://www.msteched.com/dev/public/sessions.aspx, and select "Show Track", select "Unified Communications" and then click the "Filter" button.
To get registred for TechEd Developers 2008, you can get details here: http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2008/developer/default.mspx.
See you there! I'll be in the UC Booth all week (when I'm not speaking at Breakouts, Interactive Theatres or helping in the HOLs!)!
Chris!
Since I got into the software industry, I've always been looking for technology that has the ability to fundamentally affect the way that people work on a daily basis. The UC platform is a great example of that postive change potential and it's a big reason why I do what I do at Microsoft.
Watch this video to get a feel for the subtle, but incredibly powerful impact that UC can have on the way the doctors on a daily basis. While the doctors and scenarios are fictional for the purpose of the demo, the video does a great job of showing the potential.
Where can integrated communications add value to the software you ship to your users? How can it change they way they work and communicate on a daily basis?
Great questions!
Allan Da Costa Pinto and his team have invited me to speak at the Microsoft Health & Life Sciences Developer and Solutions Conference 2008. I'll be talking about the power of communications, how more effective communications through software can help you be more effective in your work and personal life and show how you can leverage the UC Platform to build communications directly into the software you use every day.
If you're in the area and in the health field, register and please drop by. I'd love to talk about the platform and your specific needs and systems.
Allan posted details here.
While OCS 2007 is a third generation product (LCS 2003, LCS 2005 and now OCS 2007), it's not as commonly known in the industry as Exchange or SQL Server 2007. I get a lot of questions when I'm working with developers on how to setup and secure an OCS 2007 deployment.
So, where do you get the necessary skills to set up OCS 2007 as your IM, voice, video and conferencing server?
The OCS 2007 Resource Kit is a great place to start. There is enough great information here that you can crack the cover without any infrastructure set up and finish with OCS 2007 deployed.
Great resource. If you have any other resources you found useful, post a comment. I'd love to hear about them...
I'll post some details about my development environment here ASAP, since I get questions on that quite a bit as well.
I generally like any post that starts with "While waiting for Lost to start..." and ends up with something cool, but I especially like this post since it show one of the easy ways that you can extend OC 2007 to include customer functionality.
http://blogs.claritycon.com/blogs/kevin_marshall/archive/2008/03/20/google-ajax-language-api-amp-office-communicator-custom-translation-tabs.aspx
Very cool! Or should I say, Tres Cool!
It would seem that I've finally come up for air... I know what you're thinking, nobody can hold their breath for *that* long...
Anyway, I've got a back log of cool stuff to share over the next few weeks, starting with this demo we did at the Office Developer Confernce 2008 keynote given by Gurdeep Singh Pall,. It's a retail scenario demo with lots of cool communications features. Take a look, the demos speaks for itself.
Specail "props" to Jon Rauschenberger and George Durzi of Clarity Consulting for getting this demo done quickly and done right. Man, we didn't have anything but some cool ideas 2 weeks before the conference.
More coming your way...
This happened while I was in a mad rush to get the launch done, but I thought I'd mention this release.
The UCCA is what the OC 2007 team used to create OC 2007 and it's the client API used to create custom clients, or integrate OC like functionality into your apps.
Download it, check it out, do the samples and let me know what you think!
The Unified Communications Platform launched Wednesday, Oct. 16th in San Francisco. That platform includes OCS 2007, OC 2007 and Exchange SP1. I attended the launch as a presenter, presenting a session on the platform SDKs for the IT Pro/IT management audience, as well spending time talking with attendees about the UC products/platform.
I was really happy to see/feel the excitment that attendees had for the products. I'm really looking forward to spreading that excitment to the developer community (which is what gets me out of bed in the morning - well, with the help of an alarm clock).
Some highlights and thoughts below.
Keynote:
Billg and Jeff Raikes kicked off the day with a keynote that drove home the point that software driven communications will change the world of communications in the same way (and to the same magnitude) that the PC changed the world of computing. The goal of the UC platform SDKs is to create an ecosystem of value added software for this new communications paradigm much in the same way we saw with the PC.
The keynote backed up this point with great scenario driven demos and case studies. I realize the comparison between the PC revolution and software driven communications is a lofty one, but watch the keynote and post your thoughts here.
I liked the point Bill Gates made about the "democratization of communications". Moving a traditional PBX phone is often a very manual (and very costly) proposition. With UC, moving a phone is as easy unplugging it from one Ethernet port and plugging it into another. That's the most concrete example of the flexibility of software (vs. hardware) driven communications. The keynote offers others.
The same applies to writing communications based applications. How many of us developers know how to programatically control their PBX to launch/control/integrate voice calls? Chances are if they do, the code doesn't look like anything else they do in Visual Studio, or any other tool.
That's different with the UC SDKs. You can launch a call with a few lines of .NET code just by automating Communicator. That's some pretty powerful stuff... I'll blog some code here in the next few days to showcase what I mean...
Sessions:
Kirt Debique (GM, OC Platform & Solutions Mgmt), Albert Kooiman (Sr. TPM) and I presented Extensibility: Embedding Unified Communications in LOB Applications. In this session we presented a Sharepoint sight that showcased our some of our key platform capabilities for integrating communications into solutions. Those include:
· Presence and Contextual Collaboration: Presence is providing users information about whether a contact is online and available for communications. Using prebuilt sample controls, embedding presence within applications provides developers the opportunity to allow users to communicate quickly from within the application. Contextual Collaboration is using presence to launch communication sessions using IM, voice, video or conferencing and integrating information the from a system as context for the communication. This is analogous to the integration of OC 2007 within Outlook 2007. When you click “Reply with IM” you know the presence of the contacts on the To: and Cc: lines (even if they aren’t in your contact list) and can start a conversation with those contacts interjecting context (the title of the email in the title bar of the conversation window and the link in the message body) to quickly bootstrap the conversation. Developers use the presence controls to embed Presence wherever they present a name in an applications and use the control to interject context based on information in the system (customer records, sales data, etc.). The presence controls support WinForms and web via an ActiveX control.
· Information Access: Using communications such as IM or voice provides mobile users quick and secure access to enterprise data regardless of location. This is enabled via IM Bots (services that provide presence like any OC contact and an IM UI to provide access to backend data via an IM Conversation) and voice applications using OCS 2007 Speech Server. Using both these technologies to provide nontraditional IM or voice UIs provides developers the abilities to provide information access in ways that they couldn’t in the past. With IM bots, a user can access information anywhere they can access OCS 2007 (outside the firewall or with Communicator Web Access using a browser) and have a secure connection back to their data. Speech Server turns any phone to an extension of an enterprise app much in the way that the Microsoft Exchange Autoattendant provides access to email, vmail and calendaring via voice. We also discussed using Exchange Web Services to access the Exchange data store (email, calendar, free/busy, vmail, etc.) as a means to provide information access.
· Business Process Communications: Much of the latency within a business process is human latency. Think about trying to get your expense report cleared through your manager. A lot of that time is waiting to get him/her to sign off on the report (or get back to you about that golf outing you expensed). Communications can accelerate these processes by reducing that human latency. Using Windows Workflow Foundation and OCS 2007 Speech Server’s voice capabilities (text to speech and speech recognition) or IM (either through IM Bots or by alerting users to changes in state via broadcast IM) allows developers to reach users more quickly and in the right context to drive business processes.
Overall, the session was well received. It's pretty exciting stuff. I'm going to post some questions we got in the session with answers early next week, but I thought I'd provide some details on what we presented/demoed. The slides for this session and other topics here. Streaming videos (which I'm *super excited* about) is coming soon.
I have friends that live for pulling minor flubs in a demo/presentation and playing them for you in a loop. Which, I personally find *hilarious*.
Cool:
- Gibson Guitars: Gibson is an early adopter of UC and had a video showing their experience. They built a custom Les Paul guitar with the UC logo (“Unified/Simplified”) on the body. This guitar was played during the keynote kick off and then signed by Bill Gates and Jeff Raikes and given to one of the attendees of the executive roundtable session. Attendees were still talking about it during our session, the last of the day. I don't play, but thought it was really cool nonetheless.
- Sledgehammer Demo: I love the effective use of a sledgehammer during a demo and the Exchange SP1 team provided a great example. During their demo of continuous replication they showed a live failover by setting up CRS on a server and then cutting the network connection, pulling the power, flipping the server rack on its side and then taking a sledgehammer to the server and it’s drives. Gasps were heard across the room throughout the demo and attendees were really impressed with the easy restoration of data without tape backup, etc. The art of the demo is alive and well. Nice one, Ed.
I'll post some more details (questions we fielded) and follow up code next week.
Have a great weekend!
TechEd Developers 2007 Europe is in Barcelona Spain on 11/5-11/9/2007 this year. I'm very excited about this year since we're going to have a total of 7 sessions focused on developing with the UC platform, including OC 2007 SDK, OCS 2007 SDK, UCCP, UCMA, CWA AJAX APIs and Speech Server.
Sign up for TechEd and mark the sessions below on your event calendar. These sessions start out with an overview of the platform as a whole and then dive deep into the platform and SDKs. You'll leave with the solid understanding of the platform and plenty of great ideas on how you can leverage communications in your solutions.
I'll be specifically covering the Unified Communications Managed API and how you can use the UCMA to create broadcast IMs, IM Bots for information access and business process automation and other server side communications solutions.
We'll also have a booth at the event staffed with members of the team to answer questions.
Come to TechEd to get started writing UC apps!
Sessions include:
| UCM201 Unified Communications for Developers: Building Communications Into Your Applications |
| Albert Kooiman , Kirt Debique |
| Microsoft Unified Communications (UC) is turning the traditionally hardware oriented communications world into software. Building the Microsoft Unified Communications Platform, with rich APIs and solid tools support is a corner stone of that strategy. This session will give an overview of what scenarios the UC Platform enables and the APIs and SDKs that Microsoft Unified Communications offers. We will demonstrate how to integrate presence, voice over IP, video and messaging into your applications as well as how to build powerful communications applications like IM-based query/response bots, outbound notifications and speech technology enabled telephony applications. Communications now can be a first class feature in Windows and Web applications. This session is the overview session of how you can leverage that capability as an developer. |
| Mon Nov 5 16:00 - 17:15 TBC |
| |
| UCM202 Developing with Exchange Web Services |
| Jason Henderson , Adam Glick |
| Exchange 2007 unifies programmatic access to Exchange data through Exchange Web Services (EWS). EWS can be used to integrate line-of-business, ISV, and Unified Communications applications with Exchange that leverage calendaring, free-busy information, contacts, messaging, tasks, and unified messaging notifications. This session gives an overview of the Exchange Web Services APIs and their roadmap, and focuses on specific illustrations of how to use Exchange Web Services in your line-of-business applications. It includes walk-through of code examples of how to integrate data from the store into LOB applications and third party solutions, with specific examples of messaging, email notifications, auto-discover and availability services. |
| Thu Nov 8 17:30 - 18:45 TBC |
| |
| UCM301 Office Communications Server 2007 for Developers: Under the Hood |
| Kyle Marsh |
| Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 provides the infrastructure for communications including voice, video, IM, conferencing, speech and unified messaging. But OCS 2007 is also the cornerstone of a communications platform that you as a developer can use to build communications into your solutions. In this session we will take a look under the hood of OCS to examine the foundation components that OCS makes available for developers and what OCS components are important to developers. Learn how Communicator uses the advanced publish and subscribe features of OCS to implement its rich presence features and how developers can use the OCS’s conferencing infrastructure to provide multiparty IM, voice or video conference calls. |
| Mon Nov 5 17:45 - 19:00 TBC |
| |
| UCM302 Integrating Presence and Communications in Your Applications using Office Communicator |
| Kyle Marsh |
| With Outlook and Office Communicator, you can see the presence of people on from, to and cc lines of an email message and start IM, voice and video conversations or conferences. In this session you’ll learn how to build this "presence" and contextual collaboration into your Web and Windows Applications! This session will be loaded with examples and demos of how you can add rich presence information and drive collaboration tools from your applications. |
| Tue Nov 6 10:45 - 12:00 TBC |
| |
| UCM303 Embedding Communications & Presence into Your Windows Applications using Unified Communications Client API (UCCA) |
| Aatif Awan |
| Learn how to create powerful communications applications similar to Office Communicator 2007 and Live Meeting 2007 or embed Presence, Contact Management, Instant Messaging, Voice, Video and Conferencing into your existing Windows applications using Microsoft Unified Communications Client API (UCCA). UCCA is an API designed to build client applications for Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 and in this session we’ll describe the scenarios you can build into your applications using UCCA. We’ll also explore the architecture, impo | | |