In the last article, you learned about Microsoft's partner Inova IT teaming up with Avaya to provide a seamless framework for developing and deploying Microsoft .NET applications that incorporate telephony functionality. Now, let's explore the big picture regarding how all of this technology comes together in a new distributed application infrastructure allowing you to expose, deploy and manage converged applications. Further, we'll explore the SIP Application Server for Connected Services Framework (CSF).

The enterprise and Web-based markets have united around Web services and service oriented architecture (SOA) standards to create the type of distributed development, deployment and management environment that make it easy for telephony carriers and .NET developers to develop for. The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is an architectural framework for delivering Internet Protocol (IP) multimedia to mobile users, and it was created to unify the telephony infrastructure around a common IP network and application infrastructure. The IMS architecture has not been able to support converged applications up to this point, and merely addresses how application platforms are connected into this infrastructure. The combined SIP, SOA and .NET infrastructure introduced by Avaya and Inova IT merges the two worlds of IP telephony development in a way that allows you as a developer to remain loyal to your familiar .NET environment.

Let's recap the functionality of Avaya's SIP A/S, SIP SOA, OWS and Inova IT's SIP Objects.NET and SIP Servlets.NET, and how the other components fit into this distributed application infrastructure.

The Inova IT and Avaya team brings Microsoft knowledge to the computer/telephone Integration area, as Microsoft's development tools traditionally have not included the tools and the framework to provide access to telephony facilities. The focus is on providing those services, such as telephony, to .NET developers in the SIP Objects.NET and SIP Servlets.NET development frameworks to develop and provide access to services provided by Avaya's SIP Application Server (SIP A/S).

SIP Servlets.NET is a lower level approach to converged applications development based on SIP, as it brings the JSR 116 API to the .NET environment without losing the benefits SIP A/S provides, such as scalability and high availability. SIP Servlets.NET allows you as a .NET developer to manipulate SIP messages to create complex applications within the SIP Servlet container. Moreover SIP Servlets.NET allows you to use your knowledge of the .NET framework inside the Servlet code. For example, you can easily access databases through ADO.NET or create Web services through ASP.NET.

SIP Servlets.NET also provides wizard-driven templates for developers, so you only need to fill out parts of code. Similar to Avaya's Ubiquity Developer Studio (UDS), SIP Servlets.NET also provides a plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio which allows you to manage, deploy or un-deploy the created services into Avaya's UDE.

SIP Objects.NET allows you to incorporate telephony services, like conferencing or call forwarding, into your .NET applications without having to understand the nature and structure of SIP messages. It is based on Open Web Services (OWS) and exposes a predefined set of functionality, such as third-party call conferencing, call notification, and audio conferencing.