Recently my blog posts have focused on Visual Studio Extensibility, but the challenges that I have come up against at work involve vastly different technologies. One of these is in the Unified Communications space, where my team and I recently investigated the feasibility of using Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) in a contact center space. During this pilot project, I helped Ryan Hauert develop a front-end client (a scaled-back CRM application) that utilized the UCC API to interact with OCS. I also created an ACD that linked that front-end client with an IVR workflow built by Bek Yakvalkhodjiev against Speech Server 2007. Instead of using a queue to manage call routing, I used a prototype version of the algorithm that Mark Stafford explains here. The entire project took about three weeks, and that includes the time it took for all of us to learn the APIs and to set up the sandbox environment where OCS was hosted. The results were very fruitful not just for our team, but for the company as a whole to see what Microsoft has to offer versus its competitors in the UC space.

The reason I bring this up is because Mark and I will be heading to Microsoft’s Interact 2008 conference tomorrow in San Diego, California. This will be a fantastic opportunity not only to learn more about what Microsoft is bringing to the table, but also to make valuable connections with other people interested in OCS who are potentially going through the same evaluation that we are right now! If you’re interested in the contact-center-building facet of OCS and are heading to Interact ’08, feel free to drop me a line through my blog or through my email.