As the alphabet soup gets more letters, the complexity of the enterprise OCS-PBX (News - Alert) user also warms up. An animated tutorial that explains the details can be found at: http://blog.tmcnet.com/cross-talk/

 

In other words, to create not just better Unified Communications applications, but unified switching, now being called software powered voice, Microsoft (News - Alert) created the OIP-Open Interoperability Program to:

 

- Develop Industry-Class Telephony Infrastructure that work seamlessly with OCS and Exchange UM-Unified Messaging
- Develop many solutions and new ideas

- Provide a forum for customers with setup, support, and use   

- Test to enterprise-level standards for audio quality, reliability, and scalability

- Provide a means for scalable qualification of vendors

 

For more on OIP, go here: http://technet.microsoft.com/ucoip

 

Also explained in the animated tutorial is the OIP program, designed to provide PBX implementation/integration in the following configurations:

 

1 - Standalone via gateway

2 - Standalone via direct SIP

3 - Co-existence via dual forking

         - Direct SIP + PBX is qualified against Microsoft Dual-forking specification

4 - Co-existence via dual forking with RCC-Remote Call Control    

         - PBX supports Dual forking plus RCC-Remote Call Control and

         - CSTA-Computer Supported Telephony Application

 

 

RCC-Remote Call Control also known as third-party call control is provided by CSTA-Computer Supported Telephony Applications. CSTA was developed by the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) and subsequently was formally standardized by the ITU-T, incorporating the Switch-to-Computer Applications Interface (SCAI).

 

CSTA uses, among other technologies, SALT-Speech Application Language Tags specification and its SMEX-Simple Messaging Exchange element, telephony call control capabilities in MSS-Microsoft Speech Server to allow a developer to create sophisticated telephony-based speech applications that can exploit both basic call control services such as ANI-Automatic Number Identification (caller ID) and DNIS-Dialed Number Identification Service (800), using the included basic call controls, or extended call control services, to create custom call controls.

 

CSTA uses ASN.1-Abstract Syntax Notation One - a notation system for describing data structures. ASN.1, while like programming language is in fact, not a programming language. ASN.1 is a flexible notation that allows programmers to define a variety of data types and is a set of encoding rules used to transform data into a standard format that can be decoded on any system that has a decoder based on the same set of rules. 

 

SALT adds voice commands to Web applications and is an extended set of markup (meta) tags based on XML-eXtensible Markup Language though compatible with HTML-Hyper-Text Markup Language and others. Many of the features of SALT include:

 

- Multi-mode browser-driven clients - PDA-Personal Digital Assistants, etc.

- Authoring Tools - IVR-Integrated Voice Response, grammar, dialogs, commands

- Speech-driven WEB pages with voice/data databases

- Interface to analog-digital telephones within SIP/VOIP servers and integrated voice recognition

- XML services with other business services such as SOAP to OLAP database connections

In the animated tutorial is an explanation of SALT in the OSI model.

 

The animated tutorial includes some of the basic SALT commands such as:

 

- Prompt - Used to play audio prompts to direct a user to enter input

- Grammar - Used to identify how audio sentences will be analyzed

- Record - Used to trigger saving voice input

 

The concept of software powered voice is very compelling as you make voice just another XML service.

 

This presentation is included in online/onsite courses SIP Planning Guide and for OCS-101 Office Communications Server per person (volume and site license discounts available).   For more information, go to: http://www.techtionary.com/sip/planning-guide/

 

For customizing, special discounts, website animations, technical/sales training, technical writing and other services, go to http://www.techtionary.com or please call Tom Cross (News - Alert) at 303-594-1694 or [email protected]. 

 

This tutorial is also included in TMC (News - Alert) University special course on Microsoft OCS-Office Communications Server and Response Point at ITexpo.com. For more go here: http://www.tmcnet.com/voip/conference/west-08/tmc-university-microsoft-ocs.htm