As 2011 winds down, business is getting better and better at Gold Systems and we are hiring in our engineering department. We are generally looking for people with .NET or IVR experience, but we give a lot of points for attitude and aptitude, so whether you are an industry veteran or just getting started in your career, check out our Careers page.  Our headquarters is in Boulder, Colorado and it's a great place to live, but we also have people in other parts of Colorado and around the United States.  2012 is going to be a great year and if you are considering a career change, I hope you'll consider Gold Systems!

Boulder Pearl Street Mall, photo courtesy of Lee Coursey.

Tom Cross, the guy behind LyncUserForum.com, the Lync/Skype/Cloud User Forum Newsletter and TECHtionary, asked me to do some guest blog posts on using Microsoft’s UCMA SDK to create CEBP applications. If you don’t know what all those acronyms are, check out the first post here. If you wonder why you should care about a programming SDK, I try to answer that in the second post. The third post isn’t up yet at Crosstalk, so here it is, and I still need to write the fourth installment.

UCMA in the post-PBX world, part 3 of 4 by Terry Gold, CEO

I was visiting customers this week and heard another acronym that is getting tossed around a lot in our world. CEBP, or Communications Enabled Business Process. Although I think it is a terrible acronym, the idea behind it is why I’m so excited about Lync. I’ll give you my first recollection of an example of Communications Enabling a Business Process from my early days at Gold Systems.

Our very first customer twenty years ago, was Metropolitan Federal Bank in Fargo, North Dakota. We built their very first automated banking system, and while the people we worked with were very nice, the CEO was very concerned about putting an automated system in front of his customers. This bank’s roots went back to 1926 and he did not want some computerized voice annoying his customers, but the reality was that he could not staff a call center 24/7, 365 days a year, and his newer customers were demanding access to their accounts at all times. We built a system that was easy to use, and it got great acceptance. The customers who wanted to speak to a person could press zero during business hours, and the rest were able to do their banking day or night.

We did have a problem though. The system used an SNA Link to the bank’s mainframe, and it pretended to be a human at a “green screen” to get account information and then speak it back to the caller. Sometimes the mainframe would go down, or the link would fail, or the bank programmers would change the location of a field and break our application. When that happened, our application spoke the dreaded phrase, “We’re sorry, the system is not available, please call back later.”

Unfortunately for us, the CEO’s brother-in-law was a big user of the system, and he seemed to be the guy who always caught the system misbehaving. And he would call the CEO, who would call his IT director, who would call me. Something had to be done because even though the system had great up time, the “monitoring by brother-in-law” was not working. So, we got the idea to build software that would get executed whenever the system had a problem, and it would literally call us on the phone, or send email to our support group. We took a business process (I want my bank balance) and we communications-enabled it. We went on to communications-enable lots of business processes for customers, so when I first heard the acronym, CEBP I thought, “so that’s what we’ve been doing all this time!”

Today, we no longer should think of the silos of “the phone system” or “email,” we should be thinking about communications, and all forms of communications should work together.

With Microsoft Lync I can go from an email, to an IM, to voice, to video, to a conference, and I can do it with exactly one click per transition. That’s Unified Communications. Using that capability from within a business application, such as an order processing work flow application or an accounting application is CEBP. One of the customers I talked to this week called it “Transforming Business through Communications.” That’s exactly what it is!

Gold Systems CEO, Terry Gold continues to guest blog for Tom Cross on http://crosstalk-techtionary.blogspot.com/ Below is his second installment:

IVR Affordable Solutions Using UCMA - Affordable UCMA in the Post-PBX World Part 2

So what is UCMA and why should you care? According to Microsoft, it is “a managed-code platform that developers use to build applications that provide access to and control over Microsoft Enhanced Presence information, instant messaging, telephone and video calls, and audio/video conferencing.”

Given that you are reading this newsletter, you might actually know what that means, but I’m going to try to make it just a little more clear for everyone else. UCMA is software, written by Microsoft, that other software developers use to create their own applications that interact with Lync in some way. Most software today is built on other pieces of software, provided by Microsoft or other vendors. We talked about reusable code for years, and now we have it.

UCMA stands for Unified Communications Managed API. It’s one of those great acronyms that actually contains another acronym, in this case API, which stands for Application Programming Interface.

Let’s say I want to write a simple help desk application. Maybe I have agents in different locations, but they all are using Lync, and I want to know if we ever get into a situation where there are fewer than five agents available to take a call. (Or an email, or IM, it doesn’t really matter.) Using the UCMA API, I can write software that tells Lync that I want to know whenever an agent is available. The API is really just a way for my code to talk Microsoft’s code. They worry about the mechanics of communicating with Lync, while I code up the business logic. I write code that keeps track of how many agents are available and how I want to notify a supervisor if we run out of agents. Microsoft’s code handles everything else behind the scenes.

Just about anything that can be done by a user of Lync, can also be done by software using UCMA. Just as a user can make a phone call or an IM, so can my software application, courtesy of UCMA. Sometimes you’ll hear people mention the UCMA SDK. That’s just packaging around UCMA that makes it easy for a software engineer to access the API from their development environment.

UCMA isn’t just for building simple applications; in fact it can be used to build completely new products. At Gold Systems, we’ve built the first UC-Enabled IVR that works with both Microsoft Tellme in the cloud as well as on premises with, or without, Microsoft Lync. UCMA includes a speech engine, a text-to-speech engine, as well as all the telephony capabilities we needed to build our product, Vonetix 7 Voice. For us, this means that we can sell a product that is much more capable than the legacy IVR products on the market today, and we can sell it at less than half the price because we do not need to pay expensive speech engine licenses to a third party.

For our customers, that means that they now have an IVR option that was designed to work with their Lync environment. For our customer’s customers, it means we can create applications that are more “personable” and that are more satisfying to use than the traditional legacy IVR.

Other ISVs are exploring what can be done with UCMA too, and I believe that this will be what makes Lync successful. Microsoft will continue to build out the core product, and companies like Gold Systems will build around the edges creating new products that just can’t be created with the old PBXs that I started my career working on.

Ultimately UCMA is about making Lync even more capable, more affordable and extending it in ways that fit the desires of the customers who buy it. Try calling up your PBX vendor and telling them you don’t like the way they designed call routing. And not only that, but you want your own software developer to have access to their code so that you can just get in there and do it right. You can do that with Lync, thanks to UCMA.