/mcpC H A P T E R 2 Overview Cisco Unified Communications Manager is the powerful call-processing component of the Cisco Unified Communications Solution. It is a scalable, distributable, and highly available enterprise IP telephony call-processing solution. Unified Communications Manager acts as the platform for collaborative communication and as such supports a wide array of features. In order to provision, invoke the features, monitor, and control such a powerful system, Unified Communications Manager supports different interface types. This chapter also describes the major concepts of Cisco Unified TAPI service provider (Cisco Unified TSP) implementation. It contains the following sections: • Cisco Unified Communications Manager Interfaces, on page 9 • Cisco Unified TSP Overview, on page 12 • Cisco Unified TSP Concepts, on page 13 • Development Guidelines, on page 21 Cisco Unified Communications Manager Interfaces The interface types supported by Unified Communications Manager are divided into the following types: Provisioning Interfaces The following are the provisioning interfaces of Unified Communications Manager: • Administration XML • Cisco Extension Mobility service Administrative XML The Administration XML (AXL) API provides a mechanism for inserting, retrieving, updating and removing data from the Unified Communications Manager configuration database using an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interface. This allows a programmer to access UnifiedCM provisioning services using XML and exchange data in XML form, instead of using a binary library or DLL. The AXL methods, referred to as requests, are performed using a combination of HTTP and SOAP. SOAP is an XML remote procedure call protocol. Users perform requests by sending XML data to the Unified Communications Manager Publisher server. The publisher then returns the AXL response, which is also a SOAP message. Cisco Unified TAPI Developers Guide for Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Release 15 and SUs 9