Office Developer Conference UK - were you there?

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If you attended the Office Developer Conference in the UK last week, in the beautiful surroundings of Heathrow airport :-), you may have seen me presenting on the second day. I gave two presentations on the Server Track about developing applications using the Live Communications Server platform:

  • Live Communications Server - Architecture and Client Automation
  • Real Time Communications Client Applications

I took the opportunity to use one of my own earlier blog code examples on Windows Messenger tabs as a demo during the 'Client Customisation' section of my talk - except I updated the tabs for the new Office Communicator client. Happily tabs are still supported in Communicator, although there are a couple of changes to be aware of - I'll add a new blog post detailing this shortly - or you can find full details in the Office Communicator Planning and Deployment Guide (which is a great resource by the way).

There was a lot of interest in the telephony integration features of the new Office Communicator 2005 client - looks like an area that is really going to take off in the near future as more companies start taking full advantage of their existing telephone systems. In particular my presentations were focused on three key messages: Ubiquitous presence, instant communications, and contextual collaboration. Adding these to your own applications is about to become a lot easier with the release of a new control from the product team... more soon! Hopefully if you attended those were the messages you took away. Personally I learned that talking for two and a half hours gives you a very sore throat :)

I'll hopefully be finding time to blog a lot more often over the next few months to cover these exciting new areas! As you may have noticed "more often" would probably mean more than once a month judging by recent frequency, but let's see how it goes [:p]. If you were at the conference and would like to follow up with further questions, or have a suggestion for a future blog post you'd like to see, please send me feedback using the site options.

If you're at TechEd Europe 2005 this week in Amsterdam, you will be able to find me in the Ask The Experts room - I'm on the SharePoint stand, although I'll happily talk about LCS and Communicator too if you'd prefer [:D]. I'll be there during these time slots:

  • Tuesday 5th July 15:00-17:30
  • Thursday 7th July 15:00-18:00
  • Friday 8th July 12:00-14:15

See you there!