Contextual Communication

Contextual Communication is a powerful new addition in Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA) 3.0, enabling richer end-to-end communication by the integration of external data sources (Customer Relations Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Web cookies) into the conversation.

At a business level, Contextual Communication allows for the communications between a client and server to include data from external sources. This mechanism can propagate CRM, ERP, and other interaction-relevant data to the client (standard Microsoft Lync 2010 or custom clients) by way of the Lync 2010 Extensibility Window. This window is fundamentally a Silverlight-based interactive frame, capable of handling content and surfacing dashboards for automatic call dispatch (ACD) agents, point-of-sale inventory trackers, service management consoles, and a wide variety of other extensions for enhanced scenarios.

These client extensions can be used in conjunction with UCMA 3.0-based services to consume custom information from and send it to the application service, allowing for a user to exchange custom data seamlessly alongside their Lync 2010-based communications, and also send custom commands to the application server.

For more information, see Conversation Context Channel.