Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

One of the things you maybe considering in the new year is migrating from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. In this post I'm going to demonstrate how you can use the UCWA api (which is the REST API you can use to talk to a Skype for Business server either in Office365 or OnPrem) to access Skype for Business from within the Teams Client via a Teams Tab application. (For those unacquainted with UCWA this the API that is used to Access Skype within OWA). Why would you want to do this ? its one way of easing migration friction by providing a different level of interoperability (outside of using both clients) and also a way of adding functionality into the Teams client that isn't there currently.  In this post I'm going to look at showing the users Skype conversation history, while this information is also stored in a users Mailbox and also a ccessible via the Graph API, in this app I'm going to use the UCWA API to access the conversation logs via the Skype for Busin...

Skype for Business (and formally Lync before that) uses the Conversation History folder in an Exchange mailbox to store the history of your IM conversations. One message in your mailbox may represent many messages in an IM conversation where the conversation is broken out itself into an XML string in the Message in the "ConversationXml.{CA2F170A-A22B-4f0a-B899-93439DEC3FBC}" extended property which looks something a little bit like this if you dumped its values Which comes from the below underlying MAPI property While Instant Messaging hasn't been around as long as Email the statistics and Reporting on its usage even from third party vendors is pretty underwhelming as the data made available for reporting is limited. If however we take advantage of a Mailbox API like EWS or the Graph API and delve into the above information you can start to produce some more useful statistical reporting about your IM traffic. This could be especially useful at the moment if you w...

Conversations have been a hot area in the Messaging space recently with many different solutions jockeying for attention such as Yammer, Office365 Groups , Slack, HipChat, Skype for business and many other. Each solution offers a different method to communicate and thread different conversations in different ways  over different clients and communication platforms. Typically in Exchange conversations either take place in Mailboxes or Public folders while Groups are a now a newer offering. When it comes to reporting, looking at conversations can offer some interesting insights as to when conversations are happening how many people are participating and where a Group or Channel based solution might provide some form of productivity gain or usefulness. In EWS in Exchange 2010 and greator the findconversation operation allows you to query and group conversation threads in a Mailbox folder and you can then use the information returned about the co...

Conversation views in email clients have become par for the course these days, while I'm personally not a great fan it can be a useful feature to use when looking at Mailbox data. With EWS from Exchange 2010 you can use the dedicated EWS operations which are documented http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/dn610351(v=exchg.150).aspx  . In Exchange 2013 the conversation operations have been enhanced to offer more functionality such as the ability to use an AQS QueryString to filter the results plus also the ability to apply actions to conversation like applying categories or a specific retention tag. One interesting thing you can apply these conversation operations to is looking at Mailbox statistics in a different way by looking at the operation of Mailboxes to see how engaged the owners or users of the Mailboxes are, by seeing how engaged in the conversation that are happening in the Mailbox. eg The FindConversation operation in Exchan...