One of my favorite Microsoft products is OCS. I don’t know why but I can get very excited about this product. One of my last projects was the “Our people” on the Wortell website. Here we used OCS to show the presence status of our colleagues in Silverlight. (This reminds me that I still have to write a post on how it was build.)

At PDC last week the OCS team had two session on their next release:

• Microsoft Unified Communications: Developer Platform Futures
• Integrating and Extending the Microsoft Office Communicator Experience with Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight

 In this post I’ll try to give you a shore summary of what’s to come.

 OCS 14 Managed API
A new fully managed API adopting standard .NET. What we can see from the demo’s is  that there will be less code writing.

Support common applications
Support for Silverlight 4, Visual Studio 2008 and up, Blend 3 and up, .NET 3.5 and up, IE 7 & 8

 WPF and Silverlight controls
Drag and drop controls for WPF and Silverlight. Seems like there will be controls for all the features: 

• Search controls: Search input and search results
• Browse contacts
• View contacts
• Contact details as contact & hover cards
• Presence

Docking OCS windows in WPF and WinForms
Conversation window can be docked in your own applications

Conversation Contextual Information
You can send and receive contextual information for you custom application to the Communicator window. Contextual information is data that send to you calling party to quickly bring them into the same context as the context that you are in. An example is that you receive an email and you click on the sender presence symbol to start a conversation. The sender gets an OCS message. In this message a link is show to the email from where you started the conversation. When the calling party clicks this like the same email will be opened. You could do the same for you custom applications.

Menu extensions
You can add you own applications to the Communicator menu. Menu items can be added to right click main window and to the Contact Card overflow window.

Shell execution
You can shell execute your custom application and pass SIP URI’s

Conversation Window extension
A window can be attached to the conversation window. This is much like the Windows Live Messenger activities. This window has access to the conversation data. A very nice feature is, unlike now, that the conversation window stays open after the conversation has ended. This gives the user to do something with the conversation data afterwards. Seems like the OCS team does listen to their users.  And best of all, native Silverlight hosting. (so we only develop an application once J)

Extend communications to role specific kiosks
Meaning that your custom application can start a conversation without being a contact itself. This is great for hospitality like applications!

 It looks like great improvements and I’m getting all excited again. In January the Merto will start, I can’t wait to get my hands on the bits and start playing.

Keep you posted, happy programming

Tags: OCS 14, Silverlight, WPF