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Building Office Communications Server solutions with a Software + Services Model

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From a platform perspective, Office Communications Server 2007 R2 allows you to build call control and call management services.  OCS 2007 R2 also provides a federation feature to allow you to securely deploy your UC solutions in a Software + Services model.  As an example, Jon Rauschenberger (CTO of Clarity Consulting) describes how Clarity Connect was built on OCS 2007 R2 using the UC platform SDKs and deployed using a Software + Services federation model.

After talking to Jon, a few things stuck out to me about this solution:

  1. How software based communications can be leveraged as a platform to add value above and beyond just connecting calls by providing web Click-to-Chat, web Click-to-Call and skills based call routing for customer communications.  For example, using web session history as context for a customer service question, using that context to identify the right group/persons to answer the question and connecting the call based on presence and availability.
  2. How to deliver the Software + Services model for UC using federation, including hosting the solution in a datacenter and securely integrating with a customer’s on-premise deployment of OCS 2007 R2 and OC 2007 R2 via federation.
  3. How to leverage Silverlight 3.0 for the solution admin tools, dashboard and OC extensibility to provide a visually compelling UI that meets the hosted model of the solution.

You can hear Jon talk about how they developed Clarity Connect in this Ch. 9 video Building Office Communications Server solutions with a Software + Services Model. 

Details on developing custom communication logic for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 can be found on the Unified Communications Developer Center.  See TechNet for details on configuring federation for Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

You can get more details on the communications features in Clarity Connect in this video. 

Do you have a solution that is built on Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Office Communicator 2007 R2 or Exchange 2010? Interested in discussing it and how it was built? Ping me via the contact link on this blog.

Thanks,

Chris

Chris - Edited to add Ch. 9 video link.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2010
    In my opinion, Software + Service model means that you put on-premise software and SaaS service into one solution. During last year, we finished a project based on such an S+S model, deploying OCS 2007 on the enterprise's premise, and accessing cloud services provided by operator partners. End users access inner OCS functionality and cloud services(click-to-call with POTS phone, SMS, Fax, PSTN conference, publice IM connectivity) all through the same client - OC 2007 plus custom plug-ins. The distribution of apps depends on the app's characteristics, that is to say, when making the decision whether an app should be placed on-premise or as a service in the cloud, you could ask yourself questions such as "is it security-critical? is there any requirement of close coupling integration with existing on-premise apps? can we put it in the cloud to effectively reduce TCO?"