How do I Invite a user by email to a Lync 2010 cha

Question

We are using Lync 2010 server in the office. I would like to create a customer facing website that allows clients to chat to our support reps over this platform. Ideally, I would like the customer to just see the default web based interface for communicator.

When you have a chat going in Lync (Formerly office Communicator), you can invite someone to chat by email. That sends the user a link to join in the chat using the web version. I want to emulate that functionality on my webpage.

It looks like the Communicator AJAX API is promising, but all examples are for building your own custom interface and everything. I just want to link our site to the web access version.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The Communicator AJAX API is no longer around, so the recommended way to do this would be to use UCMA 3.0 to build a middle-tier bot to handle the web chat.

In it's simplest form, the bot could expose a method (e.g. StartChat) via WCF, which could then be called from your web page. On receiving a call to that method, the bot could then start a new conference, and invite the support rep to it.

Once the conference is created, you could then return the URL of the conference (the same one that's used in the email invitation) to the web page. The web page would then open a new window at that URL, which would kick-start the Silverlight client.

In reality, you would probably also want to add a few extra features, such as

• Allowing support reps to log-on to the bot to signal their willingness to take external calls
• Aggregating the presence of the logged-on support reps, to display availability to the web site user
• Route the call specifically to the logged-on support reps, and provide a way for them to accept the call

This codeplex project would be a great starting point.