Contents tagged with Office

  • Microsoft v2 Endpoint Primer

    For some time now, Microsoft has had two distinct systems for authenticating users; Microsoft Account (or MSA) and Azure Active Directory (or Azure AD); MSA for consumer services and Azure AD for enterprise services. The v2 Endpoint allow applications to authenticate both Microsoft Accounts and Azure AD accounts using a single OAUTH 2 endpoint. This allows developers to build applications that are entirely account-agnostic. This article covers the basics of using the v2 Endpoint and OAUTH2 to authenticate users.

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  • OCS: New Version, New Name

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    The press releases went up a few minutes ago so I can finally share this.

    The overly long winded name Microsoft Office Communications Server is no more. The entire product line (including Office Communicator) has been rebranded as “Lync”.

    The new product line will include:

    • Lync 2010 (replaces Communicator)
    • Lync Server 2010 (replaces Office Communications Server)
    • Lync Online (replaces Communications Online)
    • Lync Web App (replaces Web Communicator)

    You can read the full press release here: http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2010/sep10/LyncPR.mspx

    UPDATE: The UC Team has released some more details on their blog http://blogs.technet.com/b/uc/archive/2010/09/13/introducing-microsoft-lync-the-next-ocs.aspx

  • VoiceXML on Speech Server

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    Yesterday I posted about an issue with Speech Server and Vista. One reader named Bill asked a question in the comments. My response was a bit long for a comment so I decided to turn it into a separate post instead.

    Hey Marc, are you using Microsoft Speech Server with VXML?  If so, what hardware are you using on it?  Also, does MSS support CCXML?
    -Bill

    Yes, I'm using quite a bit of VoiceXML. Most of the applications I work on are written to run against the Nuance Voice Platform. I've been using VXML so that I could run them against either platform (or any other platform for that matter).

    There are some issues that I ran into where I was using Nuance specific properties (example) that Microsoft doesn't have VXML equivalents for. In those cases I needed to write them using the Speech Server managed model.

    The key thing to keep in mind is that Microsoft has implemented the VXML spec pretty much verbatim. So as long as your application is pure VXML you should be fine.

    I haven't put Speech Server through any sizing tests so I'm not sure what the hardware requirements will be in the end. That said, my development machine is a DELL D830 with 4GB of RAM running Vista Ultimate. In the lab I'm using a DELL 1950 with 4GB of RAM running Windows Server 2003. In both cases I'm using a Dialogic DMG2000 gateway.

    As for CCXML, they don't support it and I don't see that changing. I actually think CCXML is going to go the way of SALT. With only Voxeo supporting a real CCXML implementation I don't think there is going to be a lot of call for it. Also, everything you would want to do with CCXML can be done using Speech Server's Managed API. This is just a guess on my part, I don't have any inside knowledge as to what Microsoft's roadmap looks like.

  • Outlook 2003 Add-in with Visual Studio 2005?

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    Thinking of building an add-in for Outlook 2003 with Visual Studio 2005? Don't do it. Really, don't do it. What? Ok, if you must...

    I've just spend the last three days building an add-in and installing on on a single PC. This totaled about 3 hours of development time and the rest was getting the darn thing to load! Honestly, it was the single most frustrating thing I've ever encountered in years.

    The problem was that the setup program that Visual Studio 2005 automatically generates when you create an add-in project doesn't include everything you need.

    Here is how I fixed the problem:

    Before you can load your add-in you need to make sure the following is installed:

    After that you'll need to "fully trust" your assemblies. This can only be done with signed assemblies. I remember being a pain with VS 2003 but turns out is a breeze with VS 2005. Just open up the Properties for the project and select the Signing tab. From there is was fairly self explanatory.

    Now comes the part that gave me problems. After you have everything installed (including your nice newly signed assemblies) you need to give permission to those assemblies. This is done using a tool called CASPOL.EXE. Here is the command line for registering your file:

    caspol -u -ag All_Code -url "<full path to your file>" FullTrust -n "<assembly name>"

    If you have more than one file (or the above didn't work) you can also do this for a directory.

    caspol -u -ag All_Code -url "<directory path>\*" FullTrust

    I hope this helps save someone from the pain I experienced over the last few days. Hopefully this will get easier with the next release of Visual Studio...

    Updated to reference Outlook 2003. I wasn't clear about that in the original post.