Provisioning a UCMA application using ApplicationProvisioner.exe

If you are just starting out in developing an application using UCMA, you may be confused about where to get the settings to feed the constructors for ServerPlatformSettings, ApplicationEndpointSettings, and UserEndpointSettings.

If divining the port and GRUU from the entrails of an animal is not an option, you will need to start by “provisioning” your application by creating a trusted service object for it in Active Directory. If it uses an ApplicationEndpoint (usually because it is a “bot” rather than a proxy for a particular user), you will also need to provision it with one or more contacts.

The easiest way to do this provisioning is with the ApplicationProvisioner.exe tool that is packaged with the UCMA v2.0 SDK. (You will still need to have enough permissions to create trusted service objects and contact objects in Active Directory in order to use ApplicationProvisioner.exe.) You can find the tool in the UCMA SDK 2.0 directory under UCMACoreSample ApplicationsCollaborationApplicationProvisioner. You may need to compile the solution in Visual Studio to get the executable.

There is a fairly thorough step-by-step description of how to provision a new application using ApplicationProvisioner.exe on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd253360(office.13).aspx.

Once you provision your application, there are basically two ways to snap your newly minted GRUU and other settings into your UCMA code. One is simply to double-click the listing under “Servers” in ApplicationProvisioner.exe and copy the GRUU from the View Server box. At this juncture, you can drop the unpronounceable sequence of numbers and letters into a config file, live dangerously by adding it directly into your code, or even sell it on eBay for $10k and donate the proceeds to the Salvation Army.

A cleaner, if slightly more complex, alternative is to reference ApplicationProvisioning.dll from your project and use the ApplicationProvisioning API to load the settings dynamically using your application’s name. The advantage is that even if you need to change the trusted service later,you won’t need to make any configuration changes to your application. The new settings will be loaded next time you start up the application.

You can find an article on this method at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd253328(office.13).aspx.