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botframeworkbotsskype-for-businessucwa

How to get user device type accessing skype for business bot built in MS Bot Framework

Does anyone know how to get the information about user device that access the bot deployed in S4B channel and built using MS Bot Framework (C#).

I need to know about the options to detect the user device (Device type and OS) accessing the Skype For Business Bot. If there's a way to know whether user device is desktop or mobile. In bot framework the User-Agent header formatted similar to the string below:

SFBUserAgent (Microsoft-BotFramework/3.1+https://botframework.com/ua)

(The user agent from Connector returns the following:

fxversion/4.7.2563.0 osname/windowsserver2016datacenter osversion/6.3.14393 microsoft.bot.connector.connectorclient/3.14.1.1)

I want to know if UCWA can be used to detect the device type accessing Skype For Business bot.

Solution

  • UCWA is not able to do so, actually no client or client-facing api can provide such information. It's because User-Agent information is not part of the presence so the client doesn't publish it to other clients. The main purpose of this User-Agent information is for monitoring reporting purpose.

    However there is still some space from server side to allow us to do something. If you have access to the Skype for Business server, you have several workarounds.

    1. Get-CsConnections.ps1 is a well-known script to pull current logged in user from Lync server side. It was written in 2011 while we only had Lync 2010, but good news is it works fine with new version of Lync like Lync Server 2013, Skype for Business server 2015. This script needs to be run in Lync/Skype management shell or a Powershell session with Lync/Skype modules imported. It needs to run by using an Lync/Skype admin account.

      To retrieve user agent for a particular user by using sip uri.

      $UserHomePool = (Get-CsUser -Identity [sip address]).RegistrarPool Get-CsConnections.ps1 -SipAddress [sip address] -Pool $UserHomePool

    2. Connections.ps1 is the prototype script of the above Get-CsConnections.ps1, it's simpler but doesn't provide advanced features. You can look at it and decide which one you need.

    3. Do it yourself. If you don't want to use 3rd party script or just want to do it in a simplest and pure way, it's possible to do it by querying it from server database. Lync/Skype server stores this user agent information in the dynamic database in Front End server. It's in the table dbo.RegistrarEndpoint of the database rtcdyn of the instance rtclocal.

      Please notice that there is no public document about the database schema so you need to do a little guess and hacking yourself. Good news is all data in the database is strored in readable format so it shouldn't be a big issue.

    4. In a very rare chance that you are not wanting this information in real-time, the monitoring report and database can be the best approach. It's not real-time data, the data is generated within 10 mins after a conversation is ended.

      If you want to get it from monitoring database, you should look at SessionDetails view for P2P conversation and ConferenceSessionDetails for conference conversation. There are straighforward fields in the views called something like UserClientType to point out the user agent information for the certain session.

    At last one thing I would like to remind is Skype allows user to logged in multiple clients simultaneously, so no matter how you make it work you still need to face the question which logged in client really matters to you if the user has multiple clients logged in.