The Office Communicator Automation API in 2 min.

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What is it?

The Office Communicator Automation API provides programmatic access to Office Communicator 2007 R2 so you can automate Office Communicator 2007 R2 running on the client computer.

The Office Communicator Automation API is a quick and easy way to integrate Office Communicator functionality into your applications.

 

What does it do?

With the Office Communicator Automation API, you can add presence and communication features to any client application, including:

  1. Embed Presence with Application Specific Contact Lists – use the API to build contact lists specific to an application and show Office Communicator presence for those contacts.
  2. Launch Communications – add IM, voice and video communications directly in an application to allow users to communicate and collaborate directly from the application.
  3. Application Context Specific Communication – use the API to integrate data from the application into conversations the application launches to provide application specific context for the conversation.

 

What do I need to know?

The API automates Office Communicator running on the client machine allowing you to create sophisticated presence and communication features with minimal code. 

 

The API works with either Office Communicator 2007 or Office Communicator 2007 R2. 

 

Office Communicator must be deployed on each client in order for your Office Communicator Automation API code to run.

 

The API provides two COM libraries:

  • Communicator.dll – provides classes and interfaces for automating Office Communicator.  Classes and interfaces in this library often cause Office Communicator to show dialogs.  For example, when calling the method to add a contact to the Office Communicator contact list from this library, the “Add Contact” dialog is shown.
  • CommunicatorPriv.dll – provides classes and interfaces for automating Office Communicator.  Classes and intefaces in this library will never show Office Communicator dialogs.  For example, calling the method to add a contact to the contact list using this library won’t show the “Add Contact” dialog.

 

Since the API is based on the COM platform, you’ll need to treat instances of classes and interfaces as unmanaged resources and release them when you’re done to avoid resource issues such as memory leaks.

 

What do I need?

  1. Office Communications Server 2007 (or later).
  2. Office Communicator 2007 (or later).
  3. Office Communicator 2007 SDK.
  4. Visual Studio 2005 (or later).

Where can I get it?

The Office Communicator Automation API ships in the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 SDK along with samples and documentation.