Azure Communication Services interoperable with Microsoft Teams

I’ll be updating these blogs as posting more news as the sessions dive into the details, stay tuned to the blog and email updates for more. I’ll be doing a bit round-up post of all the news at the end of the week.

Azure Communication Services interoperable with Microsoft Teams in preview

Azure Communication Services, will move to general availability in the next few weeks. First launched at Ignite 2020 in September, Azure Communication Services is a CPaaS, giving API’s to enable developers an easy way to enable video, voice and chat services in their applications. It is positioned as the platform that powers Microsoft Teams. My colleague Tom Morgan has a great overview blog here. ACS enables communications scenarios such as browser-to-browser, browser-to-app and app-to-app communication. Also interacting with bots and even connectivity to the public switched telephone network. All on a consumption-based commercial model.

At the preview launch, Microsoft promised integration with Microsoft Teams was coming. Today it launched in preview. This enabled developers to build applications on ACS and have some users connect using the custom application/ACS and other users connect using Microsoft Teams. Where is this useful? Here is an example; A Video portal embedded into a healthcare website, the patient gets a great voice and video experience in the browser, all branded as the healthcare provider and the doctor can connect to the session with Teams, just like they connect to any other call or meeting.

The organisations users and IT benefit from the security, familiarity and capability of Teams, and external users, maybe customers or partners, can enjoy a custom communication experience on a web or mobile app.

I expect to see some really powerful B2C scenarios build on ACS where the organisations users simply use Teams to connect.

My colleague at Modality, Tom Morgan, has been working with ACS and Teams and has a great blog about it here.

Be sure to check out the Ignite session, Azure Communication Services | Build video, voice and chat apps with Intelligent Communications CVP, Scott Van Vliet for the latest on Azure Communication Services.