Introduction

In the words of Austin Powers - Allow myself to introduce myself...

 

My name is Michael Dunn and I'm a Senior Consultant for the North Central District. I'm now a former MVP for Office Communications Server, which I was awarded in April of 2007, and a former Magenic employee. My broad interest and skills are in general .NET development with greater focus around Unified Communications (UC), with even more specialization on Speech Server (2007). 

 

Like other .NET Developers I'm excited about SilverLight/.NET 3.5/etc, but I'm more ecstatic about UC Development.

 

You can develop UC Applications?

 

Yes! While off the shelf software typically will cover what 80% of customers need 80% of the time. What about the other 20% the other 20% of the time? That's where the extensibility features you see in most of Microsoft products comes in handy.

 

With the UC APIs you have the ability to access features from the UC products features like.... Instant Messaging, Telephony, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, Presence, Conferencing, Email, Appointments, Audio & Video.

Using this feature set you can create just about any type of communications application you can imagine...

 

My goal of this blog is give some examples of using the different UC APIs. The first couple of applications I am going to focus on building are:

  1. Presence Based ACD (Automatic Call Distribution)  - using Speech Server (2007), UC AJAX SDK & Windows Communications Foundation (WCF)
  2. Presence Based Click to Chat  - using UC AJAX SDK, ASP.NET & Windows Communications Foundation (WCF).
  3. Presence Based Click to Call