GotUC

MCITP exam for OCS R2? Maybe....

2009-08-20T18:38:00Z

I received this email yesterday. Another chance to maybe influence the future of OCS. This isn't developer related but I would love to see a MCITP exam for OCS. As a developer it helps to fully understand the whole picture. An exam will help prove your expertise.

Let me know what you think.

Microsoft Learning is exploring the possibility of creating a Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) certification exam for Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007/2007 R2. In order to understand the market need and target audience for this certification exam, we are asking individuals who have purchased/deployed or are potential customers for OCS 2007/2007 R2 to complete a brief survey that will help us identify the different job roles that work with OCS across a wide variety of organizations. Our goal is to understand which job roles work with OCS and how those job roles are differentiated from other job roles within your organization.

To participate in this survey, please click the link below, and follow the instructions on the site. The survey will take approximately 10 minutes to complete and will close on September 15th, 2009. Please note that you must complete the survey in a single session; once you have submitted your survey responses, you will not be able to access the survey again.

http://deploy.ztelligence.com/start/index.jsp?PIN=15TS9JCK7QCYX

If you know of others who are using OCS or planning to purchase OCS for their organization who would like to participate in the survey, please forward this mail to them.

Thanks for your participation. Your 10 minute investment will be invaluable to shaping the new certification exam, and ensuring that it is practical and useful globally!

New OCS Tools

2009-08-13T01:46:00Z

Some interesting new tools from Microsoft for OCS.

UC How To The Microsoft Unified Communications “How-To” training tool is a Microsoft Silverlight™ 2 application that provides step-by-step instructions for common UC tasks. You can customize the How-To application to your company’s needs based on the UC features you’ve installed. For example, if you have installed all UC features except Communicator Mobile and Communicator Group Chat, you can modify the XML file so that those features and topics do not appear in the interface.

Unified Communications Adoption and Training Kit 2007 R2 The Unified Communications Adoption and Training Kit for 2007 R2 provides guidance and resources for IT Pros, Helpdesk, and Trainers to speed adoption and usage of Unified Communications technologies in the enterprise. The kit includes Planning Checklists, Awareness materials, including Poster, Door Hangers, and E-mail samples, and User Education Materials such as Quick Reference Cards, Flash Cards, and links to Web-based Training.

These are more for architects. implementers and users but they are nice tools. Still I would love to see some developer tools.

Microsoft UC Developer Survey

2009-05-27T11:27:00Z

Microsoft asking UC developers to take a quick survey to better get to know its developer audience, carried out by Frost and Sullivan.

For example, what applications have been developed, what other communications tools besides Microsoft’s unified communications products (like Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft Office Communicator and Microsoft Exchange) you have been using, and most importantly, what Microsoft could do to better help the community?

In order to get a better insights Microsoft engaged Frost and Sullivan, an independent third party, to conduct a Unified Communications Developer survey.

If you are a developer of unified communications applications such as OCS and Communicator, please take 15 minutes and fill out this survey:

http://www.globaltestmarket.com/survey/s.phtml?sn=134581&lang=E&secid=9f8cbb

When you click the link you will be directed to a secured site hosted by Frost and Sullivan that will allow you to fill out the survey. It requires cookies to be enabled to work correctly.

Please note that Frost and Sullivan will keep all your individual responses confidential and anonymous.

Based on the data collected in the survey, Microsoft hopes to develop a set of activities to provide better assistance to you in building great enterprise solutions on the Microsoft Unified Communications platform.

Of course we will keep you posted on such activities via this blog.

UC Workflow Error Message

2009-05-26T19:38:00Z

UC Workflow Error Message

When you build a Windows Workflow application you might see the following error pop-up:

This is a known issue for which Windows Workflow team released a QFE. The QFE can be installed from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB960109

How to get the UC AJAX API to work on OCS 2007 R2?

2009-05-15T11:15:00Z

In Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Microsoft only supports the UC AJAX API in case you add a CWA Server of OCS 2007. The UC AJAX API will not be updated beyond the 2007 release, and programming directly the UC Managed API will be the recommended way to build reach applications. Yet if you want to deploy any existing UC AJAX application, you will need to go through some hoops.

For installing an OCS 2007 CWA server is not trivial in case you start with a fresh install of OCS 2007 R2: it turns out to be you need the AD Schema Prep of OCS 2007 before installing a 2007 CWA Server in an R2 Forest or else the setup will fail. If you want to read the exact steps to take to make this work, please read KB article 969336.

Some people though found there is only one difference between the UC AJAX API in OCS 2007 and API Communicator Web Access in OCS 2007 R2 is using: the URL CommandChannel.aspx became AuthCommandChannel.aspx. And it looks like that everything else is the same. This however does not solve the limitations of the UC AJAX API, such as that it does not support more than 15 concurrent IM end-points per web page. UCMA in any case remains your better choice for reach solutions. Doing it this way isn't supported by Microsoft so you do this at your own risk.

Sign-up for the UC Developer Sandbox!

2009-05-13T13:01:00Z

Today GotUC.net is proud to offer an opportunity for developers to start developing UC enabled applications, without having to overcome the hurdles of setting up Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta.

If you join the GotUC.net Community and you promise to behave well, and know we have the right to revoke your account at any time, GotUC.net will offer you two user accounts in the GotUC.net domain: one personal account, and one account you can use to enable bot scenarios.

The domain accounts are enabled for most UC capabilities Presence, IM, email and Exchange Web Services, and even some limited calling capabilities to the PSTN or to other Community users via Communicator.

What do you need to do? Simply, just -

1) Join the GotUC Community

2) Once you have joined our community you will see a new “Developer Sandbox” menu tab

3) Click the tab and you will be taken to the registration site. Once there just click the Register button then fill in the form.

I can hear you asking “Sounds great Marshall but what are the limitations?”

Well, I ‘m glad you asked. The limitations are really very simple also –

1. Please use your real name – this will be how you show up when you connect to GotUC.Net using Office Communicator. We want to present a positive image for those organizations that we federate with.

2. We expect you to behave reasonably and to not abuse the system. Other members are using the system too and we don’t want anyone crashing the system for everybody.

3. No applications that would be considered illegal or not appropriate for the intended purpose of this site. We don’t want someone using the system for Trojans or spam.

Note: we reserve the right to cancel without warning any accounts that break the rules.

We will have tutorials and videos coming shortly on how to create UC applications and debug them using our sandbox. If you have suggestions for new functionality or things that you would like to see then just let us know.

Help Shape the Future of UCMA and Speech Development

2009-05-04T12:40:00Z

As you might have noticed there are practically no speech tools yet in the UCMA 2.0 Speech SDK apart from some basic classes.

Currently Microsoft is prioritizing which tools to make available in the Wave ‘14’ release of OCS/UCMA, at which time the Speech Server functionality should become an integral part of the UC platform.

Microsoft would like to solicit the feedback from the GotSpeech.net and the GotUC.Net Communities on how to prioritize which tools to build and ship for Telephony Speech (for Desktop Speech, please check out the Windows Vista Dictation Resource Kit)

This is specifically about the speech recognition and speech synthesis tools and not about the dialog languages, like VoiceXML and Windows Workflow. UCMA 2.0 shipped with basic UC Workflow Activities including speech, and currently the Speech Server (2007) VoiceXML 2.1 browser is ported to the UCMA API and this browser will be released in the future.

Using the comment tool, could you please distribute $100 in value across the following tools we are considering to build/release, with $0 being not important at all, and any value above $0 giving it a relative value increasing with importance. You can just copy the table below into a comment or if you prefer you can just copy and email it to me – I’ll see that it gets to the right parties.

Tool	Relative value to you out of $100 total	Comments
Grammar Static Analyzer		Syntax checking
Grammar Static Analyzer		Grammar cop like in Speech Server (2007) (detecting OOV utterances)
Grammar Dynamic Analyzer		Simulator to measure grammar changes effect on the basis of existing log files
Custom Pronunciation Tool (text)		Create custom pronunciations
Custom Pronunciation Tool (audio)		Generate pronunciations from audio
Lexicon Editing Tool (app)		Tool to edit custom application lexicon
Lexicon Editing Tool (master)		Ability to edit the Microsoft provided master lexicon
Prompt Editor		Edit and align prompts in prompt database for prompt engine
Prompt Database		Store prompts, ability to check missing prompts and do version control
Prompt Engine		Concatenative prompt engine
Speech Synthesis Prompt Sculpting		Tool to edit TTS pronunciations
Custom TTS Voice Tool		Tool to create your custom TTS voice
Visual Grammar Editor		Visual SRGS grammar editor
Statistical Grammar compiler		Tool to import transcriptions and create a statistical language model from those
Conversational Grammar Engine		Conversational grammar engine like in Speech Server (2007)
Conversational Grammar Builder		Conversational grammar builder like Speech Server (2007)
Transcription Tool		Tool to transcribe and annotate the logs in a consistent manner
Log Analysis Tools		Analyze log files to see hit rates and success metrics for dialog states like in Speech Server (2007)
Offline Recognition Tool		Ability to read wave files and measure recognition rates
ASR Analysis tools		Measures word error rates, sentence error rates, etc.
Other – please specify

As per Microsoft’s default policy, this posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Many thanks in advance for your feedback.

Overview of the OCS APIs

2009-04-16T14:07:00Z

I recently blogged about the APIs that are available for developing against and extending OCS, and how choosing the best API for the given task can be bewildering at first.

It occurred to me that the main meat of that post, i.e. the overview of each API, would make a good topic for a wiki on GotUC.net. So to that end, I have created a new wiki topic here.

My hope is that the community can provide input into this to ensure that it is, and remains, a relevant resource for the newcomer to OCS development, and makes that initial barrier to developing with OCS a little lower!

Paul

New UCMA Samples Posted to Codeplex

2009-04-11T03:46:32Z

The 2007 R2 release of Microsoft Office Communications Server adds major new capabilities to the Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA). UCMA 2.0 ships with R2 and for the first time gives developers access to the voice capabilities of OCS. Over the past few months we’ve been working with the UC Platform team to build out a series of sample applications that highlight some of the scenarios that are enabled by UCMA 2.0…these samples are now available on Codeplex:

Client Billing: Web-based billing application that manages voice calls between attorneys and clients.
Cellular: UCMA powered service that publishes and subscribes to presence of users.
Enhanced Reminders: Notification service and Outlook plug-in that leverage UCMA to remind users of appointments and other events.

Michael Greenlee from Clarity did much of the engineering work on these samples, his blog is an excellent source of information on these samples and UCMA development.

Agent Communications Panel for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

2009-04-06T18:56:00Z

Today, Microsoft released to the Web the Agent Communications Panel for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. For those of you unfamiliar with this application, “the Agent Communications Panel for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is an application add-in to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. It works with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, and enables agents to manage their communications (make calls, receive calls, conference, and chat) from their Microsoft Dynamics CRM system.”

This has been a highly anticipated solution for Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM and OCS 2007 R2 customers. The web page is located here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=140789. It is available in US English only.

Upcoming MSDN Webcasts

2009-03-28T14:57:42Z

I’ll be delivering 2 MSDN Webcasts focused on the Microsoft Unified Communications developer platform. Details and registration links below.

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Exchange Server 2007 SP1: Under the Hood for Developers
4/1/2009 01:00 PM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032402872&Culture=en-US
Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Architecture and Deployment for Developers
4/29/2009 01:00 PM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032402947&Culture=en-US

Hope you are able to join me for these sessions.

jon

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 VHD Now Available

2009-03-26T18:03:00Z

You heard it first on GotUC!

You can start evaluating Office Communications Server now with a set of pre-configured VHDs available for download from Microsoft.

This is what we have all been waiting for so that we can start developing against R2. Having OCS R2 on a VHD will really help those of us who have limited budgets to spend on hardware and save a lot of time in setting up a working test environment.

Summary of Virtual Machines that are provided:

Virtual Machine	Description
DC	Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with AD,DNS, DHCP,CA
OCS-STD	Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Standard Edition server
OCS-CWA	Microsoft Office Communications Web Access 2007 R2
ExchangeUM	Microsoft Office Exchange Server 2007 SP1
OCS-Mediation	Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Mediation Server R2

Each Virtual Machine contains one Virtual Machine Hard Drive file (*.vhd) and one Virtual Machine Configuration file (config.xml), which together make up a preconfigured Virtual Machine (VM) that will run on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Server.

Thanks MIcrosoft!

So you will need a 64-bit machine with Windows Server 2008 that is Hyper-V enabled.

You can run in the following configurations:

Machine with 4 GB of RAM

Machine Name	IP Address	Base RAM	Role(s)
DC	192.168.0.18	1024	DC, DNS,DHCP, CA
OCS-STD	192.168.0.20	1024	OCS SE
OCS-CWA	192.168.0.23	512	OCS CWA
OCS-Mediation*	192.168.0.26	512	Mediation

* Note: might not be possible if the host only has only 4GB total server RAM

Machine with 8 GB of RAM

Machine Name	IP Address	Base RAM	Role(s)
DC	192.168.0.18	1024	DC, DNS,DHCP, CA
ExchangeUM	192.168.0.25	1512	Exchange 12 (MBX, HT, CAS, UM)
OCS-Std	192.168.0.20	1024	OCS SE
OCS-CWA	192.168.0.23	750	OCS CWA
OCS-Mediation	192.168.0.26	750	Mediation
Group Chat	192.168.0.35	1512	Group Chat
OCS-QMS	192.168.0.30	1512	Monitoring

Enabling Click to Communicate in Web Applications

2009-03-24T13:37:33Z

One of the most compelling and value-add capabilities of the Microsoft Unified Communications products is the ease with which you can initiate communications with others. In many instances, starting an IM conversation, phone call, or Live Meeting with another person takes no more than a few mouse clicks, or as Microsoft refers to it ‘click to communicate’. When implemented well, this is a powerful capability that not only saves time/money by reducing the effort required to start a conversation, but also results in people communicating more frequently by streamlining the process.

We see wonderful examples of this in applications like Microsoft Outlook where every place that a contact is displayed we now have a rich set of options for establishing communications with that person. One of the questions we hear most frequently from customers, however, is how they can enable these types of features in their Web applications…or in Web applications from external sources. While enabling click to communicate capabilities in a Web application does introduce some interesting challenges, we do have some great options for doing this. In this video, I walk through three options that we are working on delivering to customers:

ActiveX Control: With Office 2007 Microsoft installs an ActiveX control (name.dll) that you can use to embed a presence bubble for any user. This bubble includes a variety of click to communicate options – this is the control that Microsoft uses in SharePoint 2007.
Browser Add-in: Using a browser add-in, you can enable click to communicate capabilities for any web page that displays phone numbers.
Communication Enabled Workflows: Initiate server-side communication enabled workflows from your Web applications. These workflows can place outbound calls to employees/customers and bride other people into the calls.

Take a look at the video to see examples of all three options:

The Power of Unified Communications - Part 2

2009-03-23T13:04:40Z

Managing, automating, and streamlining communications is increasingly becoming a critical way for organizations to reduce costs, improve customer satisfaction, and increase employee productivity (and satisfaction if done properly). To achieve these goals, it’s critical to not only deploy a modern Unified Communications infrastructure, but also to make smart investments in customizing business processes to leverage the power of that infrastructure. While there are meaningful benefits that can be derived simply by deploying a product like Microsoft Office Communications Server, the real opportunities to differentiate your brand and reduce costs come through the extensibility platform the product exposes.

With the release of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Microsoft introduced version 2.0 of the Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA 2.0). This API puts powerful real time communication capabilities into the hands of millions of .NET developers. For the first time, we no longer need to use specialized tools to develop and deploy things like automated call distribution solutions or automated response systems.

In Part 2 of the Contoso Retail demo, we worked with Microsoft to build an innovative solutions for the retail environment that was focused on delivering the following benefits:

Costumer Satisfaction: Reduce the time for customers to get answers to product questions and allow them to have the products delivered as early as possible.
Workforce Utilization: Allow Contoso to better utilize their workforce by leveraging presence-based routing to tap into idle associates across all of the retail locations.
Brand Differentiation: Deliver a brand strengthening/differentiating experience for customers when they communicate with Contoso.

We’re incredibly excited about the opportunities this new platform enables.

The Power of Unified Communications - Part 1

2009-03-19T21:52:39Z

Last month Microsoft released the R2 version of Office Communications Server. This release adds some powerful new features to the product which we are excited to be using here at Clarity, but what really sets the R2 release apart from the 2007 version...and everything else on the market is the extensibility platform that Microsoft delivered along with it. We've been looking and and working with this platform for the past 9 months and are VERY excited about the capabilities it exposes for us to leverage both presence and real-time communications in the solutions we are building.

To demonstrate some of the things you can do with this platform, we have worked with Microsoft to build out a demo that highlights some of the more powerful capabilities now exposed to developers. Take a look at this video to see Part 1 of the demo which focuses on the client-side extensibility options:

I'll post Part II which focuses more on the server-side capabilities shortly.