I’‘m not sure whether this is the correct forum, but I couldn’'t think of a better place.
Microsoft seem to have integrated their products (Sharepoint, Office etc) with their Live Communication Server product to enable presence information to be presented to users.
The only disadvantage of replacing LCS with Spark and Wildfire (as I have done) is that the integration is lost.
Is their any way to replicate the functionality LCS provides to regain that functionality? I work within a software development house who are keen to provide any help they can, but I cannot really find any information on where to start.
From what I understand, there are a number of API’'s which query the information. So:
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Outlook recieves an email
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It then queries Exchange 2003 which obtains the primary SMTP address.
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Exchange (or possibly the client) assumes the email address matches the SIP address and queries the AD for their LCS server
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The LCS server is queried for the users status and that is reported back to Outlook
I assume with Wildfire we can obtain the presence information from an external component using the presence service so (4) isn’'t a problem.
The rest is pretty difficult in knowing where to start.
Does anyone have any more detail about the way in which it currently works, or suggestions of where to start?
Would this require a modification to Exchange? Could we build a generic version which doesn’'t rely on a particular email system?
Ideally, if the process could be interrupted on the client (just having the email address of the person to be queried) then queried Wildfire directly using the email address as known to Wildfire then that would be far more useful.
Any thoughts (or have I just waffled about something which others don’'t see a need for? )