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.

Determining whether a user has Enterprise Voice

Posted: February 16th, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: UCMA 4.0 | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

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” »


Call Admission Control and UCMA

Posted: October 23rd, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: UCMA 4.0 | Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

Just as dial plans, voice policies, conferencing policies, and so forth apply to trusted application endpoints, calls placed by UCMA applications can be affected by call admission control (CAC). This can produce seemingly inexplicable call failures when call admission control is enabled, and the problem is exacerbated by the fact that CAC only makes sense in larger, distributed Lync environments, and therefore is almost never turned on in development or testing environments. Issues with CAC are therefore much more likely to arise in production, and cause a great deal of vexation and hair-pulling. This post explains how to build your UCMA applications to avoid or at least identify failures related to CAC so that they will be less mysterious if they come up in a new environment. Continue reading “Call Admission Control and UCMA” »


Sending INFO messages (or other messages) with UCMA

Posted: January 8th, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: UCMA 3.0, UCMA 4.0 | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

This is one of those random things in UCMA that you almost never have to use under normal circumstances, but in that one very unusual case where you do have to use it, it can be very frustrating trying to figure out how it works in the API. Continue reading “Sending INFO messages (or other messages) with UCMA” »


VIDEO: Lync Server Logging Tool

Posted: July 17th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: UCMA 3.0 | Tags: , , | No Comments »

I’ve put together a 10-minute video showing how to use the Lync Server Logging Tool (a.k.a. OCSLogger.exe) to look at SIP messages to and from your UCMA app and troubleshoot issues.


Firewalls and UCMA applications

Posted: July 2nd, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: UCMA 3.0 | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment »

If you’ve worked with UCMA for a while, it’s likely that you’ve had at least one incident where firewall settings caused issues with a UCMA application. Since firewall configuration seems to be one of the most common sources of mysterious troubles with UCMA applications, I thought I would write up a few notes about this in the hope that it will save someone a long and frustrating troubleshooting session. Continue reading “Firewalls and UCMA applications” »


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” »


Shortening the “answer delay” with early media

Posted: May 16th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: UCMA 3.0 | Tags: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

It’s common for a UCMA app, before answering an incoming audio call, to perform some setup steps: finding an agent to take the call, preparing media, whatever. These steps may be necessary if, for example, the call is being set up as a back-to-back call and they can’t be done after the call is already established. In other cases, the way the call is set up makes the actual process of accepting the call take some time. Unfortunately, this can lead to callers hearing multiple seconds of ringing (or, even worse, silence) before the call is fully established. It can also lead to “clipping” effects where the beginning of a message or someone’s greeting is cut off because the media flow isn’t quite established yet. A feature called “early media” allows your application to get around these limitations and eliminate most of that delay or clipping. Continue reading “Shortening the “answer delay” with early media” »


Recording of UCMA 101 session

Posted: April 26th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: UCMA 3.0 | Tags: | No Comments »

For anyone who wanted to attend but couldn’t, the recording from my Lync Developer Roundtable session (“UCMA 101”) from March has been posted on the Channel 9 site:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Lync-Developer-Roundtable-UCMA-101


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” »


Rerouting requests to a UCMA application with MSPL

Posted: September 4th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Lync Development, MSPL | Tags: , , | 25 Comments »

One of the most useful (and most confusing) things you can do with Microsoft SIP Processing Language (MSPL) is change the routing behaviour of Lync Server. There are a variety of reasons why you might want to do this, but in this post I want to discuss a specific case: rerouting calls to a UCMA application. Continue reading “Rerouting requests to a UCMA application with MSPL” »