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“Hidden” property on Request Object -  Secret revealed!

We were working through the OCS SDK samples a few weeks ago and found this little gem in the “Archiver” sample.  SimpleProxy is a property on the Request object – in the SDK example below, the developer sets this property to true before proxying the request.    

//
// Mark the request as simple proxy. This will turn on
// performance optimizations that would otherwise be not
// possible.
//
e.Request.SimpleProxy = true;
e.ServerTransaction.EnableForking = false;

//
// Proxy the request.
//
e.ServerTransaction.CreateBranch().SendRequest(e.Request);

 

We searched and couldn’t find any reference to this in MSDN and other obvious places.

We wondered about these mysterious, “otherwise not possible” performance enhancements.  What are the implications of using this?  Is there any risk of creating a black hole that would destroy the universe?

We got in contact with Kyle Marsh at Microsoft who generously enlightened us on the topic. 

According to Kyle, the SimpleProxy is a performance optimization that tells OCS  “to not clone requests or responses nor create unnecessary extra transactions.”

Simple Proxy can be enabled by doing the following in managed code.

• Set ServerTransaction.EnableForking to false.
• Set Request.SimpleProxy (new API) to true.

In script-only applications (using SIP Processing Language), all non-INVITEs are automatically simple proxied unless BeginFork/EndFork is called.

INVITE’s are never simple proxied, so if the SimpleProxy flag is enabled it is silently ignored.

An attempt to set the Request.SimpleProxy flag after any of the transaction level properties have changed will raise an exception. Similarly, once the SimpleProxy flag has been set, any attempt to change the transaction level properties will raise an exception.

The simple proxy is purely a performance optimization. Specifically, it reduces the amount of data marshaled, and reduces the amount of buffer cloning necessary.

This is a very good find indeed.

-John Lamb, Modality Systems

Crossing the Chasm

At Voicecon today, IBM and Microsoft communicated that Sametime and OCS will offer Inter-domain Federation in Q4 of 2008.

The interoperability will include federated identity, presence and instant messaging.   Although this seems to be targeted at company-to-company federation scenarios, this could easily be deployed within organisations as well.   However, note that since the interoperability is through the federation interface, Sametime users and OCS users will need to be on separate SIP domains.

Both OCS 2007 and OCS 2007 R2 will be supported on the Microsoft side.

I haven’t seen any official press releases, but this IBM blog has some details:

http://www.thesametimeblog.com/sametimeblog/sametimeblog.nsf/dx/sametime-ocs-2007-interop2.htm

This will require an update to the Sametime Gateway version 8.0.2. 

-John Lamb, Modality Systems

I really, honestly try to view Cisco’s moves in the UC space in a positive light, but they keep doing things that leave me shaking my head in disbelief.

Cisco appears to be attempting to build a comprehensive suite of collaboration products by acquiring a variety of companies related to communications and collaboration:

IM – Jabber integration with MeetingPlace in 2006

Web Conferencing – WebEx acquisition in 2007

Social Networking – 5 Across acquisition in 2007

Email – PostPath acquisition in 2008

IM (again) – Jabber acquisition in 2008

The integration of these various components is a non-trivial task.  Even if it’s successful, we’ll surely see a lot of seams.  Are they going to ship a consultant with every system, just to set it up?  If they think there’s a market for pre-configured cookie-cutter deployments, then they’ve never spoken to an actual Enterprise customer.

The “spin” is that instead of offering PostPath as an Enterprise email application (the purpose for which PostPath was designed) they are going to offer it as a hosted service to compliment WebEx.  What makes absolutely no sense whatsoever is that they are taking a world-class, market leading product like WebEx and pairing it with a 3^rd rate web-based email client.

Does the world need another email application?  (We’ve got MSFT, IBM and Oracle with 10 year head starts in the Enterprise, and no shortage of really decent webmail applications from Google, MS, Yahoo, etc). Enterprise don’t do hosted services – not for email anyway – so who is this targeting?

The more recent Jabber acquisition is more interesting, if only because Jabber actually has a pretty decent installed base and relatively unique features like group chat.

The battle between Microsoft and Cisco in the UC space is going to be more fun to watch than I ever realised.