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: