Today i learned that one of the requirements for having the small Phone icon (TAPI Integration) next to y0ur Phone No’s in RTC, is depending on Microsoft Office Communicator to be installed. But my customer needed the TAPI integration, but doesn’t use Office Communicator, instead they use a combination of Asterisk and ActivaTSP.

First task was looking at the Page, to find out how the Phone Icon got displayed. On the Fields in a Page there is a property called ExtendedDatatype, it can have these values: None, Phone No., URL, E-Mail, Ratio, Masked – and it impacts the layout and behaviour of the control in a Page. Well, installing Office Communicator is not an option, so as the developer you have to come up with a possible solution/workaround. And it was actually pretty easy…

Like in Classic NAV, you have the OnAssistEdit trigger. Place this code:

Success := TAPIManagement.Dial(PhoneNumber);

if you just want to place a call, or extend it this way to open the Interaction Log Wizard:

TAPIManagement.DialContCustVendBank(TableNo,No,PhoneNo,ContAltAddrCode)

Of course you will loose the pretty icon on your Page, and have a button with the dots in it. But in return you have a working solution for TAPI from the RTC. I dont exactly know why the requirements for Office Communicator is in there, other than it is a Microsoft product!.

Here is the official wording from MS:

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, which is automatically installed by Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 Setup if it is not already present.

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 is required for instant messaging and TAPI.

Microsoft Office 2007 or 2003 is required for e-mail logging, Outlook client integration, budget importing, Office XML, SharePoint links, and budgets in Excel.

Collaboration Data Objects (CDO) are required for mail merge and e-mail logging.