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Our SharePoint 2013 customer need to display Lync presence on the client web browsers without installing Lync Client on the client PC

I am not familiar a lot with Lync development and SharePoint integration with it however I know for SharePoint 2013 and Lync 2013 was impossible because presence control is based on browser plugin as mentioned here

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tomholl/archive/2013/03/02/integrate-lync-into-your-intranet-sites-using-the-namectrl-plug-in.aspx

I make a search and found that there is a new API for Lync UCWA that target mobile and web development

I think SharePoint team will use this Lync API on the future (or maybe they already use it) to display users presence without require Lync client to be installed

The Question is:

Is their any news about this from SharePoint team? Or no news till now?

M.Ramadan
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1 Answers1

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I'm quite sure in saying that there's been no announcement around this.

The components in SharePoint 2013 (also SharePoint Online / 365) are still using the ActiveX control you mention, which requires Lync client running and signed in on client machines indeed.

However UCWA could address the requirement of retrieving and displaying users' presence. The challenge in this is how to perform the authentication: we'd need to authenticate the user or a valid Lync user in order to use UCWA and perform our queries. Viable option is to use Integrated Windows Authentication, but is very subject to browsers and users configuration. http://ucwa.lync.com/documentation/gettingstarted-authentication

Whenever we're authenticated with UCWA, we need to replace the OOB controls and views to make use of UCWA in place of namectrl. This goes over:

  • XSLT used by Content Query Web Parts
  • Display Templates used by Content By Search Web Parts
  • Client Side Rendering (CSR) templates for lists and fields (JSLink)
  • Web Parts as Contact Person, Site Members, ..
  • probably more..

This article provides a detailed overview about the different templates for contact presence included in SharePoint 2013 http://www.sharepointcolumn.com/lync-presence-indicators-in-sharepoint-2013/

As I mentioned, authentication can be a challenge, so you may want to move the communication with UCWA in a server component, and expose more friendly APIs to use in your components, maybe not requiring authentication (for intranet use), or having another type of authentication in place for this. An old project actually doing this:
https://htmlpresencecontrols.codeplex.com/

This is build using UCMA on the server, because UCWA wasn't available at that time. The UCMA part could be replaced with UCWA right now, having much less installation impact.

Massimo Prota
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