Chris Mayo's Blog - Unified Communications Development : OCS 2007

Announcing the OCS 2007 R2 Platform SDKs and New Exchange API…

cmayo — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 04:52:31 GMT

Today Chris Schindler and I presented a session at the PDC, BB09 – Office Communications Server 2007 and Exchange 2007: Platform Futures. This is the first time we’ve discussed the new R2 platform SDKs and the new Exchange Web Services Managed API outside of the beta program and the first time we’ve discussed v.Next in public.

Man, it’s great to be able to talk about we’ve been working on with the OCS and Exchange platform teams. So, here are details on the new platform.

OCS 2007 R2:

Along with the release of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Office Communicator 2007 R2, we’re going to be releasing some new APIs. The main focus of the this release is on the server side, providing more capabilities for building services that provide communication features. Here are some details on the release:

Unified Communications Managed API 2.0 – UCMA 1.0 provided a high scale/availability managed SIP stack for signaling and IM communications. It was a great API for building broadcast IM solutions or IM based query/response bots. UCMA 2.0 builds on the 1.0 version with new features:

Presence: Now you can publish presence directly from the API as well as subscribe to the presence of other contacts and receive changes in presence as events. UCMA 2.0 also supports snapshot presence queries to get the presence of contacts at a particular point in time.
Audio: Voice communications and audio call management is now supported in this release.
Conferencing: Conferencing calls (IM or voice) and conference management is now supported.

Unified Communications Managed API 2.0 Windows Workflow Activities – Built on UCMA 2.0, these workflow activities allow you to build workflows based on incoming and outgoing calls. The activities include:

IM and Speech Dialog Activities: Including statement and question activities for both IM and voice calls. These activities provide various prompts to make the conversation feel very natural and SGRS grammars to help map what the callee says to the answers you expect.
Commands: Commands allow you to define global commands when asking a question in your workflow. This allows the user to ask for help, ask for the prompt to be repeated or enact custom commands (such as “Speak to a representative.”).
Events: Events allow you to provide custom workflows for dialog events (for example, not being able to understand what was said) as well as communication events (such as the call being disconnected).
Presence: The GetPresence activity allows you to query the presence of the contacts specified in order to use in that presence in the logic of your workflow.

The Office Communicator 2007 SDK is unchanged in R2. This API allows you to integrate presence, IM, voice, video and conferencing by automating OC 2007 or OC 2007 R2 on the client machine.

Exchange 2007: Released with Exchange 2007, Exchange Web Services provides you access to the Exchange 2007 mailbox store and services such as Availability and Notifications via a single API. Exchange Web Services is *the* API for Exchange 2007 development. The new EWS Managed API provides you access to EWS functionality in a new managed API that feels much like developing with the rest of the .NET Framework rather than a set of proxy classes.

I’ll post a link to the session as soon as it’s up. We had some A/V and network issues with my first demo so I’ll record that demo again and post that too so you can get a complete picture of what the platform can do.

I had a lot of people approach me about getting access to the Beta in our Metro early adopter program. There are still spots left. Please contact me via the contact page here or see me and the PDC in the booth and we’ll discuss if your project is a good fit for the program.

Lastly, thanks to the product teams (Chris, Kyle, Oscar, Vishwa, Stephane, Vincent), technical product marketing (Albert and Adam) and the folks and Clarity Consulting for their help with the session today. Much appreciated.

Thanks,

Chris

I’m here @ PDC08

cmayo — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 05:50:18 GMT

Flight was on time(ish). Hotel is close to the convention center. All my hardware got here in one piece (though there’s actually like 14 pieces). I’ve been running through my demos and everything is looking good.*

Are you ready for the PDC? Got sessions and HOLs picked out?

We’re going to be talking about the R2 platform SDKs for the first time outside of the private Beta this week at the PDC. Here are the details on sessions/rooms/etc.

BB09 Office Communications Server and Exchange: Platform Futures

Monday 10/27 – 1:45 pm @ 408A

BB45 Office Communications Server 2007 R2: Enabling Unified Communications

Monday 10/27 – 5:15 pm @ 406A

BB46 Exchange Web Services Managed API: Unified Communications Development for Exchange

Thursday 10/30 – 8:30 am @ 408B

See you there,

Chris

*If you’re in room 1923, I’m really sorry for the constant sound of phones ringing…

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Announced

cmayo — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:03:00 GMT

We announced the next version of OCS, dubbed Office Communications Server 2007 R2, at VoiceCon Amsterdam 2008 on Monday. OCS 2007 R2 /OC 2007 R2 and the R2 platform SDKs will be released in Feb 2009.

I’ve been using OCS 2007 R2, OC 2007 R2 and developing using the R2 platform SDKs since the Alpha release back in April under the condition that I’d keep it under my hat until VoiceCon EU.

I’m ready to share some details...

The Products

There are a number of cool things in R2 to enable software based communications. Here are some tidbits that should give you a good feel for the release:

Attendant Console let’s a receptionist/team admin manage a large volume of calls through a single UI.
Desktop Sharing allows you to share your desktop directly from OC 2007 R2 without the need to launch LiveMeeting.
Response Groups allow you to define rules-based workflows to control incoming calls for a department or team so the call can be routed to the right person quickly.
Dial-In Phone Conferencing allows you to provide a call in number for OCS hosted audio conferences.
SIP Trunking allows you to use a direct VOIP connection to the Internet without using a VOIP gateway.

The Platform

In the R2 release of the platform SDKs, the updated SDKs focus on the server side. The goal is to make building communication centric services and communication enabled business processes easier to build, using OCS 2007 R2 as the server infrastructure.

From UC @ PDC post yesterday, we’ll be sharing details about the R2 platform SDKs for the first time at the PDC.

The Beta

OCS 2007 R2, OC 2007 R2 and the R2 platform SDKs is being tested by our customers and partners via a private Beta program. A private beta was necessary to keep the feedback loop fairly tight so we could keep R2 on track (R2 will ship about a year after OCS 2007).

My team runs one of the R2 beta programs. If you’re interested in building software using the R2 platform SDKs and would like to get started with the Beta, please contact me via Email link. There are some spots left in our US and worldwide programs.

Thanks,

Chris

For more details on the annoucement, check out the Eric Swift keynote video for an overview of what’s coming in R2.

Like press releases? Microsoft Unveils Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2.

UC @ PDC

cmayo — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:15:10 GMT

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

Couldn't make it to TechEd? UC Platform Webcasts in June!

cmayo — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:19:00 GMT

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

TechEd Developers 2008 is Packed with UC Development Content

cmayo — Thu, 15 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

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!

The Impact of UC in Software, A Healthcare Industry Example

cmayo — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:38:00 GMT

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!

Something to add to your UC toolbox...

cmayo — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:26:00 GMT

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.

Unified Communications Launches on 10/16 in San Francisco!

cmayo — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 20:04:00 GMT

The Unified Communications Platform launched Wednesday, Oct. 16^th 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!

Unified Communications Launch in San Fransisco, 10/16/2007

cmayo — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:02:00 GMT

The worldwide launch of our UC platform (Office Communications Server 2007, Office Communicator 2007 and Unifed Messaging with Exchange) is next week. You can find details here. The day kicks off with a keynote by Jeff Raikes and Bill Gates followed by technical sessions in verious areas (configuration, VOIP, Exchange, etc.).

I'm extremely excited to be presenting "Extensibility: Embedding Unified Communications in Line of Business Applications" with Kirt Debique (GM of UC Platform) and Albert Kooiman (Technical Product Manager, UC Platform). This session is an overview of the UC platform from the perspective of adding business value via developing for communications. We're going to discuss presence, contextual collaboration, information access using IM Bots and Exchange Web Services and business process acceleration using speech and IM.

This session will focus on deriving business value from leveraging the UC platform. I'm going to be doing more technical/developer focused sessions online and in person here over the next few weeks.

OCS 2007 Virtual Labs Now Available

cmayo — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 05:02:00 GMT

Check out this post from the UC team regarding some virtual labs you can use to try your hand at deploying OCS 2007, Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, etc.

http://blogs.technet.com/uc/archive/2007/07/21/new-microsoft-office-communications-server-2007-technet-virtual-labs.aspx

Does three posts today count as a trifecta or is more "three on a match"...

OCS 2007/OC 2007 RTM and Trial Versions Available for Download!

cmayo — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 19:28:00 GMT

After 3 years of incredibly hard work, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 have been sent to manufacturing! Congrats to the UC Product teams!

OCS 2007 and OC 2007 were released to manufacturing last week and 180 day trial versions were just made available. These trial versions were made available for the evaluation of OCS 2007/OC 2007 and for evaluating the development platform.

The OCS 2007 trial can be found here.

The OC 2007 trial can be found here.

The OCS 2007 Speech Server can be found here.

You can get support for these trial versions via the forums.

The development platform I mentioned in my last post (and made up of the SDKs below), is in the process of being released along with the server and client. Some SDKs are shipping with the RTM of OCS 2007/OC 2007, others are in RC mode in order to wrap up testing and documentation. The developer platform will be released later in the fall.

The following SDKs are shipping final versions with the RTM of OCS 2007/OC 2007 and are available now.

The following SDKs have shipped Release Candidate versions and will RTM in the fall.

Unified Communications Client SDK
Unified Communications AJAX SDK
Unified Communications Managed API SDK

All of the RTM and RC versions of the SDK can be used to write UC applications against the RTM version of OCS 2007/OC 2007, so you can start writing communications based applications today.

I’ll be posting some cool samples and code early next week!

More details at the UCG blog.