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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Presence awareness with Microsoft Live Communication Server and Lotus Connections

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I’ve been investigating ways to add presence awareness to Lotus Connections using Microsoft’s Live Communication Server instead of Lotus Sametime. I’ve been using Dogear and Google to find resources on this topic. Below is a result so far of my research. There are two high-level ways to approach this:



  1. Use the Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 SDK


  2. Use the Microsoft Communicator Web Access AJAX SDK



Option 1

- Relies on DLLs installed on a user’s workstation to enable presence awareness in applications such web.

Pros:

* Very little code to write

Cons:

* Only works on Windows workstations

* Requires a DLL to be installed (or Microsoft Office 2003 installed and configured to talk to the Live Communication Server)

* Can’t customize the user interface (provided by the DLL / ActiveX object)



Option 2

- Relies on AJAX and JSON calls to access Microsoft Communicator Web Access (CWA). This SDK allows developers to write their own IM client.

Pros:

* OS-independent

* Browser-independent

* Customizable UI

* Already used in other parts of GM

Cons:

* Requires more code than option 1 — I believe it can be generalized though…



Based on this, it’s looking as option 2 is the preferred route. I’m going to develop some sample code and test it out today and see if it works. I’ll keep you posted!

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