TSAPI is a brand name that was used by Novell to describe middleware that implemented the CSTA standard. The original code was implemented by AT&T prior to the corporate breakup. At that time they choose to have Novell 'implement' and distribute the standard presumably trying to get industry wide acceptance by having it not be part of AT&T.
Novell was overtaken by Microsoft as the leading supplier of networking software and the market demanded an NT based solution. Lucent now delivers Passageway. Passageway appears to be essentially the same code as Novell's TSAPI, except that Passageway runs on the NT platform. Many folks mix the name TSAPI and Passageway, including Lucent/Avaya. Avaya was born/renamed out of Lucent and maintains the SDK for TSAPI and JTAPI. (There have been some reports of problems reading the files from Avaya's site. A copy is at: SDK copy on Dragonnorth)
ECMA is the standards body that manages the CSTA standard. www.ecma.ch
The current CSTA standard ECMA-269 is available on a sub-page of the site.
Some specific document references and some historical documents are available in the downloads below.
NBTEST is an application that was given away by NetPhone. NBTEST uses CSTA to talk to any phone system that supports CSTA. NBTEST was originally written to test both the standard CSTA services offered by the NetPhone PBX and the proprietary 'private messages' layered on top of the standard services.
NetPhone, Inc. was purchased by Sonoma Systems. Sonoma was purchased by Nortel. The version of NBTEST that can be downloaded here is the last version that was given away by NetPhone.
NetPhone Developers Guide | A (now dated) discussion of how to implement applications in the NetPhone CSTA environment. |
NetPhone Software Developers Kit | Includes the above document, a document describing how to use NBTEST, the source code for NBTEST, built images of NBTEST, CSTA include files, and the Envoy documents below. |
LUCENT.ZIP | CSTA include files from Lucent |
Avaya (Lucent) Site | Avaya Communication (formerly Lucent) has SDK support for TSAPI and JTAPI. Their page offers both documentation and downloads. |
ECMA standard 180 (MS word) | "Protocol for Computer-Supported Telecommunications Applications" discusses the general concepts and services. Stops short of discussing any particular subroutine calling interface. (CSTA)" |
ECMA standard 180 Annex (MS word) | The Protocol Implementation Conformance Statement for the above document. This standard form shows how to list what portions of the standard are implemented by any particular implementation. |
ECMA standard 179 (MS word) | "Services for Computer-Supported Telecommunications Applications (CSTA)" discusses the computing domain and call state sequencing of CSTA. |
CSDI (Envoy document) | "NOVELL Netware Telephony Services Release 2.1 CSTA Services PBX Driver Interface Specification" This is the interface a telephone system device driver codes to. |
TSDI (Envoy document) | "NOVELL Netware Telephony Services Release 2.1 PBX Driver Interface Specification" This is the interface a telephone system device driver codes to. It may be the same document as the above but since they are different sizes is provided in case they are not the same. |
TSAPI2 (Envoy document) | "NetWare Telephony Services Release 2 Telephony Services Application Programming Interface (TSAPI)" This is the application (client side) interface. This is the interface that NBTEST is coded to. |