Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

Customer Care Framework (CCF) was a desktop-based framework which was used to address issues faced by

service provider A service provider (SP) is an organization that provides services, such as consulting, legal, real estate, communications, storage, and processing services, to other organizations. Although a service provider can be a sub-unit of the organization t ...

s caused by multiple

line of business Line of business (LOB) is a general term which refers to a product or a set of related products that serve a particular customer transaction or business need. In some industry sectors, like insurance, "line of business" also has a regulatory and ...

(LOB) systems while interacting with their customers. It was discontinued though many of its core functions were moved to an add-in for the

Microsoft Dynamics Microsoft Dynamics is a line of Business Applications, containing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). Microsoft markets Dynamics applications through a network of reselling partners who provide speciali ...

CRM product named th
Unified Service Desk
The Customer Care Framework provided a core set of functions for customer support avenues including voice call via call center agents and Internet portals. The framework used other Microsoft server products including the BizTalk Server, and SharePoint. CCF required the use of

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ...

and

Microsoft IIS Internet Information Services (IIS-pronounced 2S, formerly Internet Information Server) is an extensible web server software created by Microsoft for use with the Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and ...

for the server side, which it uses to provide a base core set of web services. CCF is targeted at medium to large enterprises. CCF was originally developed for the large

call center A call centre ( Commonwealth spelling) or call center ( American spelling; see spelling differences) is a managed capability that can be centralised or remote that is used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of enquiries by telephone ...

requirements of the

telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than tha ...

industry. CCF is different from most products from Microsoft in that it is not an 'out of the box' solution but requires development and configuration to build a working customer solution. The framework allows for a SOA methodology on development on the server and agent desktop side, but this is not mandatory and non-SOA development can be done and is normally the case.

CCF Components

Agent Desktop

The primary user interface for CCF is the agent desktop. This is a desktop-based

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

(UI) that presents data aggregated from various

Line of business Line of business (LOB) is a general term which refers to a product or a set of related products that serve a particular customer transaction or business need. In some industry sectors, like insurance, "line of business" also has a regulatory and ...

(LOB) &

OSS OSS or Oss may refer to: Places * Oss, a city and municipality in the Netherlands * Osh Airport, IATA code OSS People with the name * Oss (surname), a surname Arts and entertainment * ''O.S.S.'' (film), a 1946 World War II spy film about O ...

/ BSS application front ends and presents them in a unified view. CCF does not include an Agent Desktop application, rather samples including source code are provided as part of the framework.

Application Integration Framework (AIF)

The AIF manages the loading of the applications, integration and event brokering. Through the use of adapters (see HAT below) applications can have custom integrations to account for both the technology of the hosted application as well as business processing.

Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT)

HAT allows for the separation of the business rules and the method used to integrate with the application. HAT uses Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) to manage the business rules, Data Driven Adapters (DDAs) to manage the application directly, and Bindings written in XML to connect the two. CCF 2009 SP1 ships with 3 DDAs: Win32, Web, and Java (JDK 1.6). DDAs can be customized or extended for additional application types as needed.

Releases

*Customer Care Framework 1.0: released early 2003 *Customer Care Framework 1.1: released 2004; uses

.NET Framework 1.1 Microsoft started development on the .NET Framework in the late 1990s originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). By late 2001 the first beta versions of .NET 1.0 were released. The first version of .NET Framework was r ...

*Customer Care Framework 1.2: released 2004; uses

*Customer Care Framework 2.0: released 2005; uses

*Customer Care Framework 2005 (version 2.5.0): released Jan 2006, uses

*Customer Care Framework 2005 (QFE 1, version 2.5.1): released April 2006, uses

*Customer Care Framework 2005 (QFE 2, version 2.5.2): released 2006, uses

*Customer Care Framework 2005 (QFE 3, version 2.5.3): released August 2006, uses

*Customer Care Framework 2005 for .NET Framework 2.0 (version 2.6): built on a modified 2.5.3 base; requires

.NET Framework 2.0 Microsoft started development on the .NET Framework in the late 1990s originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). By late 2001 the first beta versions of .NET 1.0 were released. The first version of .NET Framework was ...

. Contains significant bug fixes to those base areas of CCF where the code is not available. *Customer Care Framework 2008: released 21 September 2007, uses

.NET Framework 3.0 Microsoft started development on the .NET Framework in the late 1990s originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). By late 2001 the first beta versions of .NET 1.0 were released. The first version of .NET Framework was ...

*Customer Care Framework 2009: released 28 October 2008. *Customer Care Framework 2009 Service Pack 1: released April 2009. *Customer Care Framework 2009 Service Pack 1 QFE: released August 2009, adds support for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, IE8, dynamic positioning. Adds a shell API, which (amongst others) brings improved CTI support and possibility to develop WPF shells. Any version of Customer Care Framework before CCF 2009 SP1 QFE will break when upgrading to .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.Fernando, Merill
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 breaks Microsoft CCF (Customer Care Framework)
Merill.net, 26 February 2009.

Similar Products

Microsoft's

Composite UI Application Block The Composite UI Application Block (or CAB) is an addition to Microsoft's .NET Framework for creating complex user interfaces made of loosely coupled components. Developed by Microsoft's patterns & practices team, CAB is used exclusively for develo ...

can be used to build composite applications within CCF, and a number of products similar to CCF are offered by other companies as well.

References

External links

Microsoft's Unified Service Desk documentation

Microsoft's CCF discussion board
{{Microsoft APIs Information technology management Service-oriented architecture-related products Microsoft software factories