Querying Skype for Business Online using UCWA and PowerShell

Introduction

Recently a colleague from a previous employer of mine pinged me about connecting to Skype for Business using the Unified Communications Web API (UCWA). UCWA is the REST API that comes with Skype for Business 2015 and exposes Instant Messaging and Presence capabilities. Initially UCWA was only for the OnPremise release of S4B, but this has recently been extended to Skype for Business Online.

The detail on leveraging the UCWA is all here however when it comes to actually doing it, it gets a little daunting. This blog by Matthew Proctor gives more hope and a few more threads to pull on to get something working. After jumping through a few hoops and also being pointed in the right direction from this post from Adam I got the sequence sorted to authenticate, access the API using PowerShell and then actually doing something with it. I thought I’d write it up so I can save someone else the pain (and myself if I need it in the future).

Getting Started

As per the title I’m going to show you connecting to and consuming information from Skype for Business Online using PowerShell. Naturally you’re going to need to have an Office365 Tenant with S4B and all the pre-requisites associated with that configured (such as your CNAME and SRV S4B DNS settings etc).

This post covers using PowerShell to:

• Authenticate to the UCWA API
• Get your S4B account details
• Change your status between Busy, Away and Available, Do not disturb
• Get your Contacts
• Get your Contacts status

That should give you enough to also get started and munge it for whatever you need.

Authenticating

The following script gets you authenticated to S4B Online via the API. Change the script for your S4BO account and associated password. Also update for your S4BO tenant Autodiscover URL.

See the gist on github.

Create the UCWA Application

The following script will create an application on the UCWA endpoint. The Endpoint ID you can make up yourself. Same for the Application name.

See the gist on github.

Change your Presence, Get your Contacts &  their Status

Now you can do what you want or need to with the API. Here are a few examples of changing your status, getting your contacts, getting the status of your contacts.

See the gist on github.

Contacts Statuses

Contacts List

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