Using UCMA 3.0 to build an OCS IM bot. Where do I start?

Question

I'm looking to create an IM bot for OCS which will provide users with certain pieces of information based on a series of external triggers. We use OCS exclusively in our environment, so building a bot on another platform is most likely out of the question. From my research, I found some documentation from Joe Calev on UCMA, but it's very scattered and I would prefer something I can read offline. Plus, it seems a bit unfriendly for those who've never worked with UCMA before. I can't seem to find any other good documentation aside from this.

Does anyone know a good book or series of PDFs I can refer to for a project like this? Or is it not recommended considering I've never done any work with UCMA?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'd highly recommend Programming for Unified Communications by Rui Maximo and others on the OCS team.

As well as UCMA, it also has some great information about the other APIs, and walks through how to build a development environment, which is essential if you're serious about OCS development.

At one point, i'm fairly sure this book was available as a free PDF download, so might be worth searching for (I did a quick search, but couldn't find it)

If you're interested in developing against Lync (latest release of OCS) then George Durzi and Michael Greenlee will be releasing a book in the coming months - definitely one to watch out for

Edit: I originally assumed you were talking about UCMA 2.0, as the post was tagged OCS, but noticed the title mentions UCMA 3.0. (1.0 is for OCS 2007, 2.0 is for OCS 2007 R2, 3.0 is for Lync Server 2010). if your infrastructure is Lync Server 2010, then the help files in the server SDK are the best resource until the Durzi/Greenlee book is released

Edit: Professional Unified Communications Development with Microsoft Lync Server 2010 is now available. Consider it the bible if you're doing Lync development.