The many client connection paths to Lync/Skype4b

If you are not a developer you probably think, there is a an easy simple single way to connect to Lync/Skype4b from any device.  In this Utopian world software developers would have a single set of APIs and command to create a plethora of outstanding client experiences.  Reality could not be further from the truth as I am about to show you.

A simple query against either the CDR logging or IM logging database in a Lync/Skype4b deployment is going to yield you something like this.

I know what you are thinking, what in the world am I looking at Doug?  I have made some annotations on the query to make things a little more clear.

At the top you can see a couple of different Polycom phones, one connecting via a Lync phone edition firmware, the other connecting presumably via the web REST interface which will soon probably be moved to the Skype Web SDK (a topic for another day)

Below those you see a number of UCMA applications I have running.

There are 2 highlighted block below for various different android devices, which you can see, are using 2 different types of connections as well depending on the device OS.

And lastly at the bottom you can see some of the Windows desktop Office (15) 2013 Skype for Business and Lync 2013 client connections as the rest scroll off the screen.  You can see those devices attaching via the UCCAPI.dll file and not UCMA or UCWA like some of the rest.

So what did we learn from this?  There are many SDKs and APIs for connection and data exchange in the Lync/Skype4b world, which to it's credit allows a very user friendly similar interface across the web, desktop, and mobile devices.

Doug Routledge, C# Lync, Skype for Business, SQL, Exchange, UC Developer  BridgeOC
Twitter - @droutledge @ndbridge