Rauschenblog

Upcoming MSDN Webcasts

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

1. 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
2. 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

Enabling Click to Communicate in Web Applications

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

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

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 foucuses more on the server-side capabilities shortly.