Contacts and Groups

This content is no longer actively maintained. It is provided as is, for anyone who may still be using these technologies, with no warranties or claims of accuracy with regard to the most recent product version or service release.

A contact is a presentity whose presence information is tracked. A contact registers its status, location, and other attributes with the Office Communications Server computer. Contacts can be organized into user-defined groups. In Microsoft UCMA 2.0 Core SDK, contacts and groups are supported only by UserEndpoint objects. The ContactGroupServices property on a UserEndpoint instance provides access to a ContactGroupServices instance, which an application can use to add, remove, or update properties of contacts or groups. Contacts can be associated with one or more groups. The ContactGroupServices class provides methods to subscribe or unsubscribe as well as to refresh the subscription. To update an instance of a contact or a group, an application supplies an existing contact or group instance to the ContactGroupServices API, modifies the specific fields of interest, and then publishes the new item.

A contact can be identified by its URI, and a group can be identified by its group ID, which is assigned by Office Communications Server when the group is created. An application can use methods on the ContactGroupServices class to obtain a contact or group, by using the contact URI or group ID. When an application deletes a group, all of the contacts who belong to the group are updated by the removal of their references to that group.

For more information, see ContactGroupServices.