Question

I came up with an idea to integrate Lync Server as a Java portlet to Liferay environment. What I would like to have is people names, photos, presence information and contact points on a portlet which communicates the data from Lync server.

(With contact point I mean those direct Voip or IM communications integrations that I suppose belong to the Lync concept.)

I don’t know if there exist any ready integrations and if not, what material could be found about APIs and stuff like that so that I could probably code one of my own.

Thanks for interest and tips already beforehand!

Answer 1

I’m no Liferay expert, but i’m guessing Web Based Portal – right? If so, then yes, you can do what you need to.

Are you running the Lync client on the machines? if not, then you’ll need to build some server infrastructure.

First step would be to download and install the UCMA 3.0 SDK.

At the back end, you would need to build a UCMA application that logs on to your Lync environment – the process of building and deploying is fairly lengthy, but described well here

You’d also need to build in a web service layer, so you can expose methods over the web, e.g. GetContacts, etc. The methods behind your web service would need to call into the UCMA app to fetch the required information.

Then you’d just need to build the necessary html and javascript to call the web services.

There is a codeplex project that does some of this – at the very least, it would be a great starting point

The whole thing is a lot easier if you are running Lync on the client, and if Silverlight is an option.

You’d need to download the Lync SDK. This contains a bunch of Silverlight controls that allow the user to e.g. see contact details, see a contacts availability, click to call etc. It would then just be a case of creating a Silverlight app using the controls, and then wrapping this inside a portlet.

Edit: George Durzi and Michael Greenlee’s book is great for getting started with this, whichever route you go down.