Ready for some new UCMA blogs?

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At long last this blog is back up and running.  Very soon (current goal is Wednesday), I will start a new series of UCMA blogs covering the new 2.0 API.  My goal is to eventually cover all parts of this now huge set of APIs, but unlike my previous set of posts on UCMA there will be some changes.

  1. I will not have a new post everyday.  In the last series I finished all posts before the first one was published.  They then followed each other day by day.  I do have several posts finished right now, but the rest will have to come later.
  2. My goal is to show you what the APIs can do and how to do it rather than bring you through a lengthy project buildup.  I simply don't have the time to provide a new VS project with each blog as I did with my previous series.  I also had a number of issues previously with people getting my projects to work.  I simply don't have the time right now to answer all of these questions.  I will of course debug the code on my machine to make sure it works, but you'll need to add your own project and infrastructure.

I have grand plans for this series of blogs and hope that I will have the time to implement them.  The old series consisted of 16 blogs on the signaling API - which at the time was the only part of UCMA available.  Now with UCMA 2.0 I will start with the signaling APIs again, then move to the collaboration and media APIs as well as the speech APIs (which are separate).  I currently do not plan to blog about the Workflow based APIs, though I may add them if I can find the time.  Right now I have a list of 51 blogs that I hope to write.

As you can imagine, things are quite busy here.  While many of you are eagerly anticipating Office Communications Server 2007 R2, we are busy planning and working on future releases.  To be honest, I have worked on R2 projects before at Microsoft and OCS 2007 RS really doesn't feel like an R2 - there are just too many new features and parts.  However, as much work as we accomplished for R2, a lot more will take place in the future so I guess when you put it into perspective it is an R2.

So, Wednesday will be the day that the new UCMA 2.0 blogs show up.  Be warned though that I intend to start off with the Signaling APIs, which are very similar to the UCMA 1.0 API.  I have given myself until Wednesday to try to write a few more blogs in the series so you don't see too many days where there are no blogs.