Determining whether a user has Enterprise Voice

How can your UCMA application determine whether a Lync user is enabled for Enterprise Voice? The answer is a bit more complex than you might think. In short, the best way appears to be establishing a UserEndpoint for the user in question, subscribing to local owner presence, and checking the information in the userProperties presence category. The rest of this post describes how to do this. Continue reading “Determining whether a user has Enterprise Voice” »

Presence updates and multiple application pools

In Lync development, as in many other areas of life, things get much more complicated when you have more than one application pool. You need to start thinking about scenarios that previously weren’t possible. One important case your application needs to account for if it may be deployed across more than one pool of servers is receiving presence updates from different pools of Front End servers. You can often get away with ignoring this effect, but you risk running into strange and seemingly inexplicable behaviour once in a while. This post explains the issue and what you can do about it. Continue reading “Presence updates and multiple application pools” »

UCMA application unexpectedly answering user’s calls

This was an interesting scenario that had me completely confused at first. Audio calls and instant messages to real Lync users were mysteriously being answered by a totally unrelated UCMA application, without ever appearing in the users’ Lync clients, so you would try to call or IM someone and unexpectedly get a generic IVR menu.

After puzzling over this weird behavior for a while, I figured out that there are some interesting side effects you can run into if you use UserEndpoints and a default routing endpoint in the same UCMA application – specifically, within the same collaboration platform. Continue reading “UCMA application unexpectedly answering user’s calls” »

RemotePresenceView and connectivity failures

Recently I’ve been doing some investigating on how presence subscriptions from UCMA applications are affected by losses of network connectivity. In some applications, having up to date presence information is critical to the proper functioning of the application, and it is important to be sure that the application can discover and react to interruptions to its notifications of presence updates. Various kinds of network connectivity disruptions can interfere with the delivery of presence notifications: Continue reading “RemotePresenceView and connectivity failures” »