While the UC products provide lot of rich functionality out-of-box for implementing Business Process Communication, they also form the basis of rich development platform.

There are two approaches available to integrate the capabilities of Unified Communications platform with the Line of Business applications to get the maximum benefit out of UC platform.

1.    Embed the UC capabilities into LOB applications using controls and API provided by the UC platform.

2.    Extend the UC platform clients by creating add-ins for them which display data from various LOB applications.

The integration of LOB with UC platform intersects with the Office Business Applications (OBA) platform which also involves lot of Office Server System products integrating with LOB application through Sharepoint primarily.

UC platform exposes various APIs and provides controls which can be used to extend/automate existing features or embed them in various LOB applications.

·         Exchange Server 2007 SP1 API

o    Extending and customizing Exchange Server

·         Office Communications Server API

Create applications that customize and extend OCS 2007. E.g. archiving, modification of message content body, message logging, filtering & blocking messages based on rules.

o    Office Communications Server Application API: Provides Microsoft SIP Processing Language (MSPL) for custom SIP message filtering and routing.

o    Office Communications Server Management API: Develop WMI extension for OCS 2007

·         Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server API

o    Develop voice response applications.

·         Office Communicator Automation API

o    Extend and customize office communicator or access instance of Office Communicator from custom windows applications.

·         Office Live Meeting Service API

o    Developing Web and Windows based client for Office Live Meeting.

·         Office Live Meeting Service Portal API

o    To automate the Live Meeting Account Management.

·         Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA)

o    Server or middle tier applications supporting real-time communication.

o    Current version is 1.0. UCMA 2.0 coming with OCS 2007 R2.

·         Unified Communications Client API (UCCA)

o    Real-time communication clients similar to Office Communicator.

·         Unified Communications AJAX API

o    Used to develop web based clients by providing programmatic interface to Communicator Web Access functionality.

·         Presence Controls: Available as managed and ActiveX control. Can be used to embed presence information in applications.