Call Lync IE Accelerator – Now Available!

Lync comes with an Internet Explorer Add-On which adds a call shortcut to any telephone numbers it recognises on the page.

I bet this works really well in the States, but in the UK (and, I’m guessing) lots of other countries, the UK format doesn’t get picked up by the parser, isn’t recognised and therefore doesn’t get a shortcut.

As a work-around to this, I’ve created a very simple IE Accelerator. It’s a selection-based accelerator, which means you can select any text you want, and Lync will try and call it. (It works best with real phone numbers, but will also work for internal extension numbers.)

It’s a little finicky because in an accelerator you can only make an HTTP call. So, I’m making an call to a page, passing the selected number, then using JavaScript to invoke to call. That works fine, but the downside is that you’re left with a new page open in the browser. There’s really nothing I can do about that so I’ve stuck a big smiley face on it.

In order to submit the Accelerator to the IE Gallery, it had to have a webpage. I’d recently read Scott Hansleman’s post on creating a Windows Phone app, and really liked the Wp7AppSite website template. So, I used that. I know it’s not a phone app. Meh.

Anyway, until it gets featured as the Number One Accelerator in the UK  ;-p , you can install it for yourself by visiting /accelerator/