People hardly ever talk about doing “mashups” based on Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS). But that hasn’t kept the folks at Gold Systems, specifically its founder Terry Gold, from treating the published API’s and development tools associated with OCS as a platform for innovation. Specifically, Gold tweaked the presence indicators and “notes” functions embedded in the Communicator client so that OCS users can “follow” one another (to use Twitter-like parlance) and post messages that resemble Tweets.

There was such a strong resemblance to Twitter that users asked whether Gold Systems could give users the ability to post to Twitter through OCS. The answer was “yes” and the solution was baked into the Communicator client in very short order, as was a link to Facebook as well. Gold Systems packages the features as the “Social Center” application for OCS. Terry’s informal name is “Twitter for the Enterprise.” He posits that some IT departments will find it a preferable way for employees to post to Twitter because it adds authentication (meaning that employees are authenticated through Active Directory when they log into OCS). It also gives the company the ability to filter posts for inappropriate language or to apply business rules that can detect other compliance issues, for example, if a company representative is about to make a notoriously forbidden “forward-looking statement” that violates SEC disclosure laws.

You can view a demonstration of Social Center in this YouTube video. I’m also preparing an advisory to provide more detail into the origin and evolution of this example of “recombinant applications” built on the OCS framework.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, Microsoft OCS, Gold Systems, Microsoft