Connected Services Framework

Introduced in Feb. 2005, the Connected Services Framework (CSF) is a highly customizable server-based product that runs on Microsoft’s application platform, particularly Windows Server and the .NET development platform. The goal of the CSF is to make it easier for customers-particularly telecommunications providers-to offer new Web-based services to end users. These services could be provided directly by the telecommunications company or outsourced to a partner and might include Web-based e-mail, Voice-over-IP (VoIP), presence, advanced telephony (such as voice mail, multiparty conferencing, and hosted PBX systems that offer virtual phone extensions for each employee in a small business), document management, or multifunction services that gather data from multiple online services (for instance, a traffic advisory service that aggregates traffic information from a local government agency, location data from the user’s cell phone signal, and mapping data from MSN’s MapPoint service).

In particular, the CSF is meant to address the challenge of integrating these new services with one another and with telecommunications companies’ back-end systems, such as operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS), such as billing systems. Today, there is no agreed-upon method for building a new Web-based service, and integration with back-end systems is accomplished through proprietary APIs-two factors that make it difficult to develop and add new services. The CSF addresses these problems by establishing a service-oriented architecture (SOA), in which all systems communicate with one another using Web services protocols and agreed-upon schema. Often, a proof of concept for a particular CSF solution is built by a solutions group within the Communications Sector organization, aided by Microsoft Consulting Services.