Using Telephony in Applications

Telephony capabilities help people get the most from telecommunications systems, allowing them to more efficiently manage their voice calls and control their data-transfer operations. You can use TAPI to bring this efficiency to any application—database manager, spreadsheet, word-processing application, personal information manager—any application that can benefit by sending and receiving data through the telephone network.

TAPI gives you a consistent set of tools for incorporating these features into your applications:

• Connect directly to the telephone network rather than rely on a separate communications application.
• Dial phone numbers automatically.
• Transmit documents as files, faxes, or electronic mail.
• Access data from news retrieval and other information services.
• Set up and manage conference calls.
• Receive, store, and sort voice mail.
• Use caller-ID to automate the handling of incoming calls.
• Control the operations of a remote computer.
• Compute collaboratively over telephone lines.

TAPI provides your application with access to the telephone network, you provide your users with access to these features. This means you choose and create a user interface that is consistent with the rest of your application. For example, if you use drag and drop functionality extensively, you could let the user send files or faxes through the telephone to a colleague by dragging the icon of the file to an icon representing the colleague's destination. Similarly, you could let the user initiate conference calls by dragging three or four names from an electronic directory into a "Conference box" and clicking a "Connect" command. You choose the interface and let TAPI make and manage the telephone connections.