Is there a way to access Microsoft OCS Directory/Presence information using a web service?

Question

We are working on a client app that should search and download directory information from Microsoft OCS server (OCS old as well as Lync). Does OCS provide web services type api? From what I understand, the client needs to do sip handshake before it can do directory related queries. Having dependency on sip stack is not desirable. So I am wondering if there is a way (like SOAP web service or something like that) to do it. The client is a C++ client with access to gSoap or curl type library running on Linux platform.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

No, there is no web service out of the box that gives you what you need.

I thin your best bet would be to build a UCMA application that would sit on an application server inside your OCS/Lync infrastructure. You could then build a web service to access this. For OCS 2007, you'd need to use UCMA 1.0. For OCS 2007 R2, UCMA 2.0 and for Lync, UCMA 3.0