Introduction In early 2015 Microsoft released — a RESTful JQuery API which interacts with Skype for Business. UCWA is a very powerful way of communicating with Skype for Business using just HTTP Request and Response calls — but this adds complexity when trying to use it for simple scenarios. Skype Web SDK adds this support today through the use of a plugin, and soon it will support the ORTC API and the need for the plugin will be removed. Visitors to a webpage will be told that the chat feature is either Online or Offline, based on checking the presence of a specific user. Assuming the user is Online webpage visitors will be able to start an instant message conversation. They will also be able to start a video call directly from their browser, without needing to have Skype for Business installed! Disclaimer: in order to keep the scope of the example confined the scenario involves signing in as a specific user with a hardcoded username and password stored in JavaScript and checking the presence of a specific user. This is not appropriate for real-world usage and would not scale — it is done purely to show some of the capabilities of Skype for Business. In order to use Skype Web SDK you should. Skype Web SDK is in Public Preview and you should review and agree to the before use. The page will also start a new conversation with that user. Whilst this is a good demo of what the Skype Web SDK can do, there are some problems here which prevent this being a workable solution for all but the smallest of projects. The credentials are in the JavaScript, so they can be seen by anyone. You can only contact a single person. Finally, to use the video features described in this blog post you need to use Internet Explorer, not Firefox of Chrome and install the Skype for Business Plugin High-Level Design In this scenario website users visitors are able to communicate with someone who is able to answer their questions an expert. When a visitor visits our webpage, the Skype Web SDK code will sign into a Skype for Business environment and monitor the status of a specific user the expert , displaying this status to the visitor. If the expert is available then the visitor will be able to send Instant Messages to the expert and receive responses. The visitor will also be able to upscale the conversation by adding video capabilities. This involved roughly 270 lines of code of JavaScript, plus using the Microsoft-provided JS library helper files roughly 3000 LOC. This is a very unscientific comparison — but less lines of code to babysit is definitely a Good Thing! Rather than providing a static URL for the SDK, Microsoft have instead used bootstrapper code to ensure that you always receive the most recent and up to date version of the SDK. To use this, you first add a reference to the SkypeBootstrap. Assuming the initialisation is succesfull I am then calling the function SignIn : var client; Skype. This object is of type Application and is the top level class for the Skype Web SDK. All other parts of the SDK can be reached from this object, as can be seen in the Skype Web SDK Object Model: Once you have instantiated the Application object you can then access all other parts of the object graph. This single function call to the SignIn function of the SignInManager object abstracts away all the Autodiscover and handshaking required to log in to Skype for Business. Using our reference to the Application object, we can use the personAndGroupsManager to search for a particular person. Because in our example we know the SIP address of the expert we can expect only a single record back. The results are always enclosed in an array, even if there is just one match, as in this case. This includes a changed function — making it easy for us to set up a call to a function when the status changes. Finally, we call subscribe on the person object to register our interests in the calls. This makes it easy for us to update the UI by hiding or showing the chat console: function ExpertPresenceChanged newStatus { console. This is done via the ConversationManager, using the method createConversation. There are no parameters but the method returns a handle to a new conversation object. The next thing to do is to add participants to the conversation. The signed-in user is automatically added to the conversation because they are creating it, but we need to add the expert user. This is done with the createParticipant method, which creates the participant object, which we then add to the participants collection. At this point the conversation is set up and ready to be started. Before we do though we will subscribe to two events so that we can react when they occur. The History Service keeps a collection of messages sent and received, so being notified of these events allows us to keep the UI up to date throughout the conversation. This allows the user to upgrade their instant message conversation to a full video call, within the browser. There are some cavetas to that today — you need to have the Skype Plugin installed for this to work. However this restriction is being worked on and you can expect it to be removed in a future version of the SDK. You would think that adding video capabilities to this example would be a complicated process. Firstly, we call start on the videoService to start it up, in very much the same way as for the chatService. We do the same for the expert participant, although we have to wait for the state of the video object to become connected before we can do this. Finally, we mark the video channel as started to force the SDK to display the incoming video. Conclusion, Code The full source code for this example is on , so I encourage you to walk through the code yourself. Hi Tom, Thanks for your post. I am trying to develop a chat client for the web. I am however having an issue… I get this error: 403 Forbidden 403 Forbidden I can access the urls above in my browser without any errors. What could I possibly be missing on the server side?
