Microsoft Lync and Skype for Business have a rich set of .NET APIs which make it easy to extend the platform and integrate it with other applications. This blog helps explain how to use those APIs.

Outbound calls from UCMA without Lync Server

Posted: June 15th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: UCMA 3.0 | Tags: , , , | 7 Comments »

In my past blog post on standalone UCMA applications, I described how to build a UCMA application that can answer calls totally independently of Lync Server. Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about standalone UCMA applications, and I wanted to answer two of them in this post. The first is how to place outbound calls from a UCMA application that isn’t connected to Lync Server. The second is how to bypass Lync Server for certain calls from a UCMA application that is connected to Lync Server.

For both of these things, you can use an awesome, little-known UCMA class called ConnectionContext. Continue reading “Outbound calls from UCMA without Lync Server” »


Standalone UCMA applications: which features work?

Posted: May 24th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: UCMA 3.0 | Tags: | 2 Comments »

Recently I’ve been getting lots of questions about standalone UCMA applications, by which I mean UCMA applications that don’t register at all with Lync Server, and I thought it might be helpful to write about which features of UCMA work with standalone applications, and which require Lync Server. Continue reading “Standalone UCMA applications: which features work?” »


UCMA 3.0 applications without Lync Server

Posted: September 30th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: UCMA 3.0 | Tags: , , | 24 Comments »

One topic that I wanted to write about in Professional Unified Communications Development that did not make it into the book because of time and space considerations is how to create UCMA applications that don’t depend on Lync Server. Now, at first this may seem like a strange and clueless idea, akin to carrying around a cell phone when you haven’t got any cell phone service. But there are actually some very real reasons why you might like to build a UCMA application without Lync Server.

A simple and common example is interactive voice response (IVR) systems. It’s certainly possible to set these up as trusted endpoints that register with Lync Server. But if you want to route calls directly to an IVR (whether from a SIP trunk, a PBX, an Asterisk server, or something else) where Lync Server is not present, you can do this with a standalone UCMA application. In this post, I’ll show how to set up a simple UCMA application in this way, and how to place test calls to it using CounterPath‘s X-Lite softphone. Continue reading “UCMA 3.0 applications without Lync Server” »