Application Server is a platform introduced in Office Communications Server 2007 R2 that makes it easier to build server-side applications that run on Standard Edition servers or Enterprise Edition pool servers. Applications developed using the Unified Communication Managed APIs (UCMA) 2.0 can use the Application Server platform as a common framework that leverages Office Communications Server capabilities such as deployment, trust, administration, load balancing and routing, and monitoring.
Without Application Server, each application developer would have to create his own deployment, administration and integration story, leading to repeated effort, more time to market, and inconsistent behavior. Proliferation of these different solutions would also lead to complexity in deploying and maintaining the Office Communications Server deployment.
Application Server is designed to host server applications that act as SIP endpoints. It is not intended to host Web applications and does not integrate with Internet Information Services (IIS), although applications running on it can expose Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web service endpoints.
Like the Office Communications Server Conferencing Servers, Application Server is another server role, and when deployed on an Enterprise Edition consolidated pool topology each Application Server application runs on all servers in the pool and together they share the overall workload of the application.
The Application Server implementation in Office Communications Server 2007 R2 is the first stage in the evolution of the platform, and in this release it hosts four new applications that come with Office Communications Server 2007 R2: Response Group Service, Outside Voice Control (also known as Call Control Service), Conferencing Attendant, and the Conferencing Announcement Service. However, in this release, Application Server is not supported as a platform for third-party applications.
The topics in this section is intended to help Office Communications Server administrators and product specialists have a deeper understanding of the Application Server architecture and applications and prepare them to troubleshoot any issues encountered involving the four Application Server applications included with this release of the product.