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Office Mobile Service Guidelines Enhanced for Office 2010

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In the last month, we published a set of three articles for Microsoft Office 2010 Mobile Service. Office 2010 Mobile Service (OMS) allows users to seamlessly integrate mobile capabilities of Microsoft Outlook 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 with their mobile devices. OMS in Office 2010 is the enhanced version of Outlook Mobile Service in the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

The OMS client is built into Outlook and SharePoint. OMS allows Outlook users to manage mobile messaging accounts in parallel with email accounts. Outlook users send text and multimedia messages in Outlook clients. Developers build OMS web services and host them at carriers or mobile message content service providers, delivering the messages to a text or multimedia message service center of carriers. In SharePoint 2010, users can receive alerts in the form of text messages via OMS. Such alerts are similar in functionality to alerts delivered by email, for example, notifications for updates in a SharePoint document library.

The first of the set of three articles, Office 2010 Mobile Service Guidelines (Part 1 of 3), describes OMS architecture, message flow, and the communication protocols between OMS clients and web services. As part of the protocol, OMS web services must follow the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and implement 4 web methods: GetServiceInfo, GetUserInfo, DeliverXms, and DeliverXmsBatch. These web methods use XML-formatted strings (for example, serviceInfo, userInfo, and xmsResponse) that comply with the OMS XML schemas. See this article for an implementation of a simple OMS web service.

The second article in the set, Office 2010 Mobile Service Guidelines (Part 2 of 3), provides guidelines and recommendations for developing and hosting an OMS web service. The article shows an example of a web site that manages the sign-up and configuration processes for an OMS web service provider. It also discusses using message traffic logging to track frequent errors encountered by OMS users, which is valuable for improving an OMS web service.

The third article in the set, Office 2010 Mobile Service Guidelines (Part 3 of 3), describes the OMS XML schemas for data that is passed between OMS web providers and OMS clients, and provides the WSDL definition for an OMS web service. In Office 2010, there are two new OMS schemas: the DeliveryResponsesBatch schema which supports responses from an OMS web service in a batch, and MessagesBatch schema. The DeliveryResponsesBatch schema supports responses from a web service in a batch, and defines an xmsResponses string that is returned by the DeliverXmsBatch web method to indicate success or failure of delivery. The xmsResponses string contains multiple xmsResponse child elements. The MessagesBatch schema supports message data sent to an OMS web service in a batch, and defines a packageXml string that stores message information, including the content of the message and its intended recipients, for a number of mobile messages. The packageXml string contains multiple xmsData child elements. Both xmsResponses and packageXml strings are defined in the OMS XML set of schemas. All 7 OMS XML schemas are documented in this article. Their schema references are also available for download as part of the Outlook 2010: XML Schema Reference.

For further open specification documentation for OMS protocol, see [MS-OMS] at Office Mobile Service Protocol Specification.