Support21 and Ton Stegeman [MVP]

As you probably see my colleague Ton Stegeman (MVP – Office SharePoint Server) also at e-office microsoft team is currently working on our new Support21 application.

What is support21?

The e-office support21 solution adds the power of speech server to a traditional support application. A support call by a customer would – in a traditional support environment – have to be handled by a (1^st line) helpdesk employee. In the e-office support21 solution, this interaction is handled by the Speech Server. A support call by a customer is recorded and categorized by the speech server and filed in a SharePoint site. A follow up is produced by a 2^nd line helpdesk employee and the speech server calls back the customer and ‘tells him’ the answer to his question. Apart from the obvious efficiency advantage, the solution removes the necessity for the support center to be in the same time zone as their customer.

Read the entire blogpost on the weblog of Ton Stegeman!

Something completely different this time. Must be my first blogpost in 2.5 years without the word SharePoint. I just started developing for Office Communications Server. On the weblogs of my colleguaes Joachim and Marc you can find a lot more information on OCS. I will post some of the things that I had some challenges with, or I found difficult to get started with. This post also contains the links that got me started.

I am working on a WCF service that is using the AC AJAX API to communicate to the OCS server. The UC AJAX SDK contains a sample that is really nice to study. It helps you to get a feel of what it is like to build an application using OCS technologies. The biggest challenge for me was to get used to programming everything asynchronous. Studying and debugging he SDK example really helped here. This sample also contains the wrapper components that make your live a lot easier. This wrapper and the request builder do all the hard work for you, and you can focus on your application. The wrapper is also packaged in a CWA connector on the weblog of Michael Dunn.