Contacts and Groups

A contact is a presentity whose presence information is tracked. A contact registers its status, location, and other attributes with the Microsoft Lync Server 2010 computer. Contacts can be organized into user-defined groups. In Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA) 3.0, contacts and groups are supported only by UserEndpoint objects. The ContactGroupServices property on a UserEndpoint instance provides access to a ContactGroupServices instance, which an application can use to add or remove groups, or update groups by adding or removing contacts. Contacts can be associated with one or more groups. The ContactGroupServices class provides methods to subscribe or unsubscribe to a user’s contacts or groups, as well as to refresh the subscription. To update an instance of a contact or a group, an application supplies an existing contact or group instance to the ContactGroupServices API, modifies the specific fields of interest, and then publishes the new item.

A contact can be identified by its URI, and a group can be identified by its group ID, which is assigned by Lync Server 2010 when the group is created. An application can use methods on the ContactGroupServices class to obtain a contact or group, by using the contact URI or group ID. When an application deletes a group, all of the contacts who belong to the group are updated by the removal of their references to that group.

For more information, see ContactGroupServices.