Nothing beats the spoken word for speed and efficiency when collaborating on an idea. Clearly there are many ways to communicate quickly today, for example email, instant messaging, twitter, and texting (SMS). Although these methods might be quick, they are not nearly as effective as picking up the phone and expressing your ideas verbally. But today, connecting with people over the phone can prove to be a challenging task as email and instant messaging gain preference over the phone as a primary personal preference for communications.

But what if you could combine the speed and efficiency of email or instant messaging with the impact of the spoken word? What if you could call one of your suppliers to instantly connect with a knowledgeable sales representative about a new development tool? You would get the information you need when you needed it (i.e. now). At the same time, your supplier would be connected to a qualified lead and would not upset you by forcing you to listen to a call menu and then wait on-hold for 20 minutes.

This type of instant connection is possible today as millions of Internet users flock to social-media outlets like Facebook and MySpace. The fact that so many people visit these sites daily means ample opportunity exists for companies to take advantage and connect with customers in new ways. In this article, I will show how Avaya combined their AE Services platform with one of the most popular social networks today, Facebook.

Application Enablement Services Provide Telephony RAD Capabilities
The Avaya communication platforms all contain capabilities that allow developers to build applications that connect people in new and different ways. For example, Avaya Application Enablement Services (AE Services) provides a set of telephony capabilities for Avaya Communication Manager that can be used in your applications.

Before we take a look at the Avaya Facebook Application, let's take a look at what AE Services is and what it delivers. Avaya AE Services is middleware, exposing APIs that provide developers with access to a core set of telephony-related features for Avaya Communication Manager, such as telephone call information and call control capabilities. By providing a rich set of APIs, client-side libraries, protocols, and web services, AE Services serves as the link between your application and Avaya Communication Manager. All that's left is for you to map the desired functionality from your application to the AE Services using one or more of the APIs, such as the Telephony Web Service.

The Telephony Web Service, which is one of the many SDKs provided with AE Services, gives you basic telephony features related to call handling. The web service provides key call controls that allow you to initiate calls, transfer calls and disconnect calls. Table 1 contains the main calls in the Telephony Web Service.

Table 1. The AE Services Telephony Web Service Methods

As you can see, these methods reduce the complexity of making calls and managing existing connections. The complexity of managing session state has been abstracted by AE Services so that all you need to do is maintain Session IDs that identify your session when making calls through AE Services.

Facebook Application Showcases AE Services Feature Set
Avaya recently created a Facebook application that serves as a great example of just what is possible when you develop with AE Services. In just over four weeks, an internal team at Avaya built a "Click-to-Call" (CTC) application that allows Facebook users to call their friends and associates from within the Facebook network.

After adding the CTC application, Facebook users can access a contact database of other users of the application and then initiate a call at any time with the click of a button.

Figure 1. The Avaya Click-To-Call Application Residing in Facebook

Thanks to the API provided by Facebook, user interface elements were a simple part of the development process (see Figure 1). All that was needed to integrate with Facebook was to follow the specifications of the Facebook API and then map the UI elements to AE Services methods (for example mapping the Call button to the makeCall method).

From an architecture standpoint, the components of the CTC application are (see Figure 2):

Figure 2. The Avaya Click-To-Call Facebook Application Architecture and Process Flow

Perhaps the easiest way to understand how these components work together is to walk through the establishment of a call (see Figure 2).