The Windows Live Agents team has just released a new Visual Studio SDK and several enhancements to the Agents platform. Windows Live Agents v5.0 is a full public release that takes the features of the Colloquis SDK, a limited release which operated in a Java environment, and integrates them into a Visual Studio IDE plug-in.
If you haven't heard of it, a Windows Live Agent is a smart computer application that operates over text messaging networks. An agent (formerly called a "Buddy")
interacts with people by using natural language interactions. People
can ask questions of the agent, and the agent responds with
information. Agents can be developed for virtually any kind of content,
such as services or entertainment news.
To learn more about Windows Live Agents and download the SDK, check out the following links:
Here’s a quick summary of the new features (from the Windows Live Agents blog):
Visual Studio SDK
We will be retiring the old standalone Colloquis SDK (versions 4.3 and previous) within 90 days of our 5.0 release. The process by which you take your previously developed projects and update them will be discussed with our release notes, but we want to ensure that developers have Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 Standard (or above) prior to the release of our Agents plug-in. Please subscribe to Alerts on our blog page for availability of the SDK as we will be posting the announcement there.
Partner Hosting Infrastructure (PHI)
We are streamlining the process by which projects can be hosted within Microsoft, if you choose to be hosted with us. The old method of contacting a project manager within Microsoft will be replaced with our PHI system. Within PHI, you will be submitting your Agents through an automated system, receiving status on your project, and administering all your projects through a single console. Hosting of your Agent will require a nominal yearly fee that offsets hardware costs. We will be updating folks on the pricing model in the near future on our blog and through Windows Live development announcements, but it’s likely you’ll be able to waive these hosting fees if you are working with an MSN Market. Microsoft will only host Agents that are developed within the languages that are supported by the SDK (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese; Portuguese and Dutch will release in the next few months).
Agent Provisioning
As part of the ongoing safety for our end-users, the ability to have a Windows Live ID provisioned as an Agent will require that the Windows Live Agent SDK is used for development of your Agent. The previous method of submitting through Windows Live Gallery is no longer supported and will soon be removed from the system all together. Provisioning an Agent lifts the limit of contacts within Windows Live Messenger, but will be enforced strictly to ensure our Platform is in use.
Compliance
The Windows Live Agents SDK is now enforcing Policy Compliance in all responses from an Agent hosted by Microsoft. What this means to you as a developer is that your Agent may not respond with the exact text that you had scripted during your development. When an Agent is hosted by Microsoft, we’ll have an additional set of tools that runs against your code to ensure that the response is appropriate for any and all users of Messenger. We are holding our developers to the highest standards in online safety and will be posting blog entries on how you can safeguard your code within the SDK prior to Windows Live hosting. You will be able to easily mimic the production conversation during development with these tools, so you can be sure your Agent is compliant with online safety guidelines. If you are working with an MSN Market or Microsoft product, you will be hosted by Microsoft and subject to these tools.
Self-Hosting
As you are downloading the new SDK, you may run this free version with your production Agent, in your own environment. There are limitations on sessions within this self-host model, as well as some other limitations in terms of high availability deployments, but it is almost exactly the same product as we would host for you through PHI. This is an ideal setup for the smaller development teams that do not have SLA’s on their Agent and wish to prototype features. We have found this scenario to easily handle a large percentage of Agent traffic in the field today. Again, this model enforces that the Agent SDK is in place to connect to Messenger as a provisioned Agent.