Application of SOA in Unified Communications

In the past, application development was a slow evolution: the business recognized the functionality they needed in their infrastructure and asked IT to develop an application that would meet that need. Before SOA, the problem often evolved or changed, requiring the application to be modified or, worse, redeveloped, while IT was required to develop, test, and train people on the solution. The appeal of SOA is that it enables administrators to reuse code without having to rewrite it every time. The end result is a significant reduction in the time it takes to develop and deliver applications, while allowing the business to connect services in new and innovative ways.

How does this relate to unified communications? For years, telephony was typically associated with PBX systems running over wide area networks and often using proprietary software. To create business applications that support telephony and data compatibility, developers needed a deep understanding of VoIP technology and the associated proprietary infrastructure. Because this particular type of knowledge was not always available, businesses allowed their communications to leave the wide area network and into disconnected "communication islands," preventing real-time applications from being integrated into business applications. This is where SOA helps.

Rather than relying on a VoIP genius on their team, an enterprise can develop simple Web services for common telephony-related tasks and then adapt them based on experience. For example, an application that pulls in customer contact information can be programmed not only to display that data but also to initiate a phone call or instant messaging session with that person. One of the most important examples of converged communications on the market today is Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS) and its client application, Office Communicator.

From the end-user's point of view, OCS and Office Communicator provide fully integrated support for online status-based instant messaging, file transfer, whiteboard and application sharing, and real-time audio and video communications. More importantly, OCS supports integration with Microsoft Outlook (email), Word (word processing), Excel (forms), PowerPoint (presentation pictures) and other applications, effectively providing communication functions for these desktop office applications. This integration has proven to be very useful. For example, an end user receives an e-mail from a contact. The end user can see the real-time online status of the contact, start an instant messaging chat or start a voice call with the contact. All of these operations can be completed in the Outlook program. SOA is creating new opportunities for the same communication by enabling the integration of new business processes between voice and data networks and turning common tasks into reusable Web services to improve workflow and common business behaviors.

By adopting an SOA approach to unified communications, enterprises can gain the benefits of applications with communications capabilities while simplifying the processes required to create these applications and making them more accessible to developers. By implementing an IT strategy that leverages SOA-compatible standards and a wide range of applications for unified communications, enterprises can secure, direct, control or monitor any real-time process, thereby reducing the cost and complexity of common applications associated with these initiatives. Removing the burden of having to learn complex policy models or rewrite code for individual applications will create a win-win situation, allowing developers to quickly and effectively align and execute IT strategies with management's perspective.