Patent 7356409 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on April, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Systems, methods, and data structures for pluggable terminals are provided. Pluggable terminals are part of client and server TAPI communications systems. Pluggable terminal allow third parties to provide their own media processing devices and implement control methods for those devices. Methods for plugging in a pluggable terminal and conducting a communications session using the new pluggable terminal are described. A data structure for a pluggable terminal type has a wrapper around a media processing device control method. A data structure for registering a pluggable terminal has a terminal class name, a unique identifier, and a set of media types supported by the pluggable terminal. A data structure for a terminal base class has an interface for plugging in a pluggable terminal and another interface for a TAPI application component.