Application developers of both commercial and corporate in-house software benefit from a CTI API that provides telephony network- and hardware-independence. Rather than having to write separate applications for proprietary APIs, developers can write to a standard API, allowing one application to be used across a broad array of different types of networks and equipment. And because of the popularity of both Windows 95 and Windows NT, developers are offered the critical market mass to warrant an investment in the development of full-featured telephony applications. And, as has been noted, freeing developers from being tied to a particular hardware platform means they can focus on the primary task of creating innovative, easy-to-use applications, and not waste time having to worry about the plumbing.
Developers can choose the features they want to incorporate, and then link them together with a value-added interface consistent with the rest of the application. For example, if drag-and-drop is used extensively, a developer could let the user send files or facsimiles through the telephone to a colleague by dragging the icon of the file to an icon representing the colleague's destination. Similarly, the user could initiate conference calls by dragging three or four names from an electronic directory into a "Conference box" and clicking a "Connect" command. The developer can create the interface, and let TAPI carry out the work needed to make and manage the telephone connections.