Integrating presence into your applications

I have seen a lot of questions lately asking how one can add presence to a communications application.  There are a number of ways to do this, but I don't think we have done a great job explaining what they are.

First, and perhaps what has confused people the most, there is currently no support for presence in UCMA 1.0. I can certainly understand that this doesn't seem to make sense, especially because UCMA has support for SUBSCRIBE, NOTIFY, and PUBLISH SIP messages.  The primary reason for this is the interal presence protocol we use is not public.  Therefore, although UCMA 1.0 does support the appropriate SIP messages for presence, you would need to know the protocol used to specify and extract presence information.  I do suspect this will be corrected in the future, but this is the case for the current version of UCMA.

So how can you detect a user's presence and set it in your own applications?  There are three ways that I know of and I will describe them in order of easy - hard.

First, you can use the Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 SDK, available here.  This is what Microsoft Office uses and so, if your goal is to add presence support to an existing client application, this is probably your best bet.  The API is quite simple and easy to follow.  Perhaps in a future blog I will give some examples.  This API also uses Communicator for the actual communications pieces.  You can see this in Outlook today.  If you select to call someone, Communicator opens and does the actual calling.  The call is not made through Outlook.  For most people, this is fine - but if you want your own control over the communications experience you will need to use UCCA, which is listed below.

The second possibility is to use Communicator Web Access.  This is the best way to go for web applications and can also be used by client applications through secure HTTP requests.  This is also the best solution to use when you have non-Windows clients.  I currently do not have plans to cover this API, but if there is interest in it I can make an effort.  Currently CWA is the only solution I know of for server applications.

The third possibility is UCCA, which I described in more detail in an earlier blog.  This is clearly the most difficult solution, but is also the most powerful.  Typically UCCA is used to create new clients functionally similar to Communicator.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 20, 2007
  I thought that OCS supported 'rich presence info' (i.e. custom presence). Are you saying that there's no way to set this or is it just a UCMA issue and that UCCA fully supports it?

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2007
  UCCA has support for rich presence, UCMA currently does not

• Anonymous
  August 27, 2007
  Can we detect presence of OC client at remote place with the help of UCCA without creating instance of OC client?

• Anonymous
  October 04, 2007
  Is UCCA realy aimed to be used from a server (for instance monitoring thousands of users)? Is it true that one can license the non public presence protocol through MCPP and use with UCMA?

• Anonymous
  October 04, 2007
  UCCA is not intended for server use - use UCMA instead. It is true that you can license the non public presence protocol.

• Anonymous
  October 24, 2007
  Joe: What is required to have OC client be able to listen to the presence broadcast from phones like the Snom 360?  We don't know whether a 3rd party presence server is necessary and keep falling into the trap of testing RCC Gateways, which is not really what we want (our goal is call forking and phone presence, not to control the phone from OC).  Any light you can shed would be greatly appreciated.  For the many integrators & OCS enthusiasts, phone presence tied into OC seems to be the last obstacle.  Many thanks, Fred fgaston*@*gastonassoc.com