Overview
Skype for Business Trusted Application API – Enabling
communications services for the cloud
1.
Overview
An
essential part of the Skype for Business value proposition includes commercial
ISV solutions and developer foundation that unblock and drive enterprise
deployments of Skype for Business Online and Business Voice.
The
Trusted Application API supports the vision of a ubiquitous Skype for Business
Enterprise Cloud and a mandate to provide an equivalent and expanded level of
feature richness to the one already available to on-premises Skype for Business
customers through its middle-tier platform: the
Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA).
Built
on the Skype for Business Online Platform Service, the Trusted Application API
allows developers to build immersive, smart, interactive and rich communication
experiences and services that span across users, groups, virtual agents and
providers.
The
Trusted Application API marks an evolution of the middle tier platform, UCMA,
towards a normalized service-oriented architecture. Fundamentally, the core
Platform Service shares the same compute and storage resources across multiple
applications, tenants, and domains. It helps reduce operational costs and makes
scaling easier as demand grows. At the same time, it guarantees to its service
consumers and end users that communication resources and tenant/domain-specific
application data are properly isolated to mitigate any security risks that
would stem from untrusted tenants and applications.
The
Skype for Business Online Platform Service exposes
Trusted Application REST APIs that require both:
·
domain-level authorization by System or Tenant-Admin to be exercised,
·
Service-to-service authentication of the Application that invokes them.
For
security and billing reasons, granting an application the permissions to access
such APIs is a prerogative of Tenant Administrators rather than end-users.
For
illustration purposes, the Trusted Application API exposes the following
high-privilege APIs:
·
back-to-backing calls to conceal the identities of customer service
representative in a B2C call
·
invisibly monitor an online meeting and its roster while having full control
over the actions that can be taken in the conference including managing
real-time media routes for silent monitoring, coaching scenarios and
broadcasting in a conference,
·
pop or insert calls in a call pit,
·
use large amounts of computation-intensive real time resources for Voice/Video
playback, recording, or speech synthesis or recognition
Once
a Tenant Admin gives consent to use an Application (which may either imply an
increased per-user monthly fee or pay-per-use billing) they may manage it to
the extent of permissions that are usually bound to the domain (or a subset)
they administer.
The Trusted
Application API allows you to write SFB Online applications that act as a
service endpoint and do not require a user context or identity. The most common scenarios are applications
that schedule or manage on-demand meetings like a contact center type
application, that can create on demand meetings to handle customer calls and
add customer service representatives to the meeting, voice based call answering
and routing bots.
Example
solutions:
Attendant
console, Customer engagement / Contact Center, Recording, Compliance, Bots,
Meeting Management, Click-to-chat, Click-to-call, and Value Add solutions
Other
such applications include but are not limited to:
-Bots
and Notifications
-Anonymous
Customer Web Chat
·
PSTN audio conferencing (IVR to join the conference, in-meeting Personal
Virtual Assistant, and in-meeting announcements),
·
service-side meeting recording,
·
inbound/outbound IVRs,
·
helpdesk,
·
expert-finder,
·
contact center,
·
ads on hold
2.
Architecture Diagram
3.
Scope of June 30th
Release
The
June 30th TAP release will focus on establishing the core app development model
for Trusted Services in Skype for Business Online. The release also focuses on the following
Instant Messaging based scenarios:
-Outgoing
notifications services
-Anonymous
Customer Web Chat
Out of Scope for the June 30th Release
Note,
the following scenarios and features are not available in the current release
-PSTN
support
-Audio
and Video support
-Internal
Help Desk Scenarios (Trusted Application endpoint is not discoverable as a
contact object through the Skype for Business Client)
-Discoverable
IM bots in the Skype for Business client
-licensing
requirements for Trusted Applications
-IT
Admin application registration experience in the O365 Admin Console
-load
and capacity planning
-reporting
and analytics