The Goldfish Bowl : Communicator

Presence Controls for Office Communicator released

grahamtyler — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 19:48:00 GMT

Recently I enthused about the planned RTC Presence Toolkit, which would provide an easy way for developers to add integrated communications and presence to their own applications. The toolkit has now been published as the "Presence Controls for Office Communicator 2005".

If you're already using Office Communicator as your client interface you'll be familiar with the new 'Gumdrop' icons which indicate presence - these can now be used in your custom applications, complete with action menus. "Suck them and see" :-)

Behold the Gumdrop! (RTC Presence Toolkit announced)

grahamtyler — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 13:51:00 GMT

Microsoft has now formally announced the "RTC Presence Toolkit" at the Worldwide Partner Conference 2005. If you were at my presentation at the Office Developer Conference UK last month, you saw a demo of the beta version - which is variously referred to as the "Persona" control and the 'Gumdrop' control due to the new icons used by Office Communicator :-)

The toolkit will make it way easier for developers to add presence, communications and contextual collaboration to their own applications. Gumdrops everywhere! The toolkit should hopefully be released in July - keep watching for the release to msdn!

Office Developer Conference UK - were you there?

grahamtyler — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 13:31:00 GMT

If you attended the Office Developer Conference in the UK last week, in the beautiful surroundings of Heathrow airport :-), you may have seen me presenting on the second day. I gave two presentations on the Server Track about developing applications using the Live Communications Server platform:

Live Communications Server - Architecture and Client Automation
Real Time Communications Client Applications

I took the opportunity to use one of my own earlier blog code examples on Windows Messenger tabs as a demo during the 'Client Customisation' section of my talk - except I updated the tabs for the new Office Communicator client. Happily tabs are still supported in Communicator, although there are a couple of changes to be aware of - I'll add a new blog post detailing this shortly - or you can find full details in the Office Communicator Planning and Deployment Guide (which is a great resource by the way).

There was a lot of interest in the telephony integration features of the new Office Communicator 2005 client - looks like an area that is really going to take off in the near future as more companies start taking full advantage of their existing telephone systems. In particular my presentations were focused on three key messages: Ubiquitous presence, instant communications, and contextual collaboration. Adding these to your own applications is about to become a lot easier with the release of a new control from the product team... more soon! Hopefully if you attended those were the messages you took away. Personally I learned that talking for two and a half hours gives you a very sore throat :)

I'll hopefully be finding time to blog a lot more often over the next few months to cover these exciting new areas! As you may have noticed "more often" would probably mean more than once a month judging by recent frequency, but let's see how it goes [:p]. If you were at the conference and would like to follow up with further questions, or have a suggestion for a future blog post you'd like to see, please send me feedback using the site options.

If you're at TechEd Europe 2005 this week in Amsterdam, you will be able to find me in the Ask The Experts room - I'm on the SharePoint stand, although I'll happily talk about LCS and Communicator too if you'd prefer [:D]. I'll be there during these time slots:

Tuesday 5th July 15:00-17:30
Thursday 7th July 15:00-18:00
Friday 8th July 12:00-14:15

See you there!

Office Communicator 2005 - next generation of communications!

grahamtyler — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 20:31:00 GMT

You may have seen Bill Gates announce the new Office Communicator 2005 product recently (if not, you can watch a recording). This is the future of comms - and you could try it now by signing up for the beta programme! (instructions here)

Mayur has written a great overview of the new software here. I'm sure there will be plenty of reasons for further posts about Communicator over the next few months - watch this space!

Here's the blurb from the product site:

Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 is an enterprise messenger that integrates communications capabilities (including instant messaging, rich presence, PC-based voice and video, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and enterprise telephony) with productivity and other communications applications.

Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 will be the recommended client for Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005, which provides a standards-based, enterprise-grade, instant messaging (IM) solution and an extensible, real-time collaboration platform to connect people, information, and business processes seamlessly in real time.