Application Scenarios
This content is no longer actively maintained.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 Unified Communications AJAX API client can provide customized functionality to manage user presence; maintain contacts or groups; control how other users access the application owners presence information; find users within the network; and send and receive instant messages. A Unified Communications AJAX API client application can interoperate with any other Communicator-compatible clients including Communicator and Unified Communications clients. This means that a Unified Communications client can communicate with a Communicator (desktop) client and/or another Unified Communications client through Instant Messaging (IM); it is aware of changes initiated from these other clients; and its presence is also made aware to the other clients.
Note
Microsoft Office Unified Communications AJAX SDK (2007 Release) does not support features of video, and application sharing with any remote client.
The following gives an example of how the Unified Communications AJAX SDK may be used.
Example 1
Service vehicles of Contoso, Ltd. are wirelessly connected to the dispatch center that uses Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to maintain presence information of the fleet. Each vehicle is embedded with a device that can signal the status of the vehicle depending on whether it is running, idle, or turned off. Every time a vehicle changes status, the information is transmitted to the dispatch center. When a service call comes in, a dispatcher wants to quickly determine which vehicle, if any, is available to answer the customers call. The Unified Communications AJAX API can be used to create a scripting utility to transmit such presence information. Here, the Unified Communications API client is attractive because the embedded device may be running a nonstandard operating system and requires a small footprint on the client.
Example 2
Contoso, Ltd. is a real estate escrow company. The company has a workstation-based client production application used by escrow officers to create documents and manage a to-do list for each escrow transaction. This escrow production application written using C#, also implements Unified Communications AJAX API client code within one of its Microsoft Windows forms. Contoso owns and maintains a Web application called Contoso.com that its clients use to access their escrow transaction details. The Contoso developer responsible for the Web site has used the Unified Communications AJAX API to create a Unified Communications Client page on the site. Contoso's clients can use the Contoso Web site to initiate IM conversations with the Escrow Officer responsible for their real estate transaction. Contoso discovered using this technology allows its professionals to serve their clients more responsively and efficiently.
Example 3
Contoso is a large organization with thousands of employees spread across the western United States. The Human Resources department of Contoso is located in Omaha, Nebraska and does not have any representatives in the remote offices. In addition to the customer facing Web site referred to in example 2, Contoso has an intranet Web site for company communications. Employees typically access the intranet find answers to questions about their benefits. These searches usually result in a telephone call to the Human Resources department.
The Human Resources department has not been able to expand its staff quickly enough to keep pace with overall company growth. For this reason, staff members find that they cannot respond to individual employees within the company in a timely manner. To alleviate this situation, the IT department created a Unified Communications AJAX API Client page on the intranet site so that Human Resources representatives could interact with employees through IM. This has enabled the Human Resources department to double the number of employee queries it handles in a day. Employees are happy because their questions are answered in a timely manner. The cost of the development of the Unified Communications solution was more than offset by the avoidance of the expense of additional Human Resources staff.
To support the scenarios described in these examples, Contoso did the following:
Created an organizational unit within their Active Directory store designated to hold their external customers. When an escrow is opened with Contoso, an IT staffer creates a user in the Contoso AD store for the new escrow client. The IT staff is able to limit the access of these users to the rest of the internal network through permissions settings.
Deployed and maintains a server dedicated to hosting a Microsoft Office Communicator Web Access service.
Deployed an Edge server to give its customers access to the Communicator Web Access Server.