Microsoft just announced the increased interoperability of Azure Communication Services with Microsoft Teams as Azure Communication Services support becomes generally available for Teams users. This is a piece of positive news for organizations looking for new ways to connect staff, customers, and partners.
Azure Communication Services aims to help businesses transform their communication experiences and meet the needs of their customers and employees. Its interoperability with Microsoft Teams provides the flexibility and scalability required for building custom app experiences connecting people to the Teams platform and getting more value out of their communication investments.
It will enable:
- Development of specialized business applications that enable Teams users with calling experiences directly within the app.
- Creation of new workflows for apps requiring custom management of incoming and outgoing Teams phone calls.
- Bringing Teams calling capabilities into devices not supported with the standard Teams client.
The integration with the Graph API will give developers access to building custom communications apps for Teams users on any endpoint. Developers can create chat rooms, channels, or meetings and manage chats within them as well add information about organization employees.
This announcement by Microsoft empowers developers with two new capabilities for application development. They can get access tokens for Teams users with Azure Communication Services Identity SDK and manage Teams Voice over IP calls Teams phone calls and Teams meetings with Azure Communication Services JavaScript Calling SDK.
These capabilities will help developers to create custom applications that will,
- Permit Teams users to make and receive calls and join Teams Meetings as Teams users.
- Manage outgoing and incoming phone calls based on Teams Phone System and integration with Teams auto attendants and call queues.
- Respect the assigned Teams user policies.
Teams users can join calls with other Teams users from/to custom applications built with Azure Communication Services – Image source
New use cases
Developers can take advantage of Azure Communication Services’ support for Teams identities together with Graph API features and other Azure services to implement a range of customer use cases like:
- Collaboration into any line of business application to integrate calling capabilities directly into those applications so that the users can collaborate directly from them.
- Enhanced customer and employee communications experience by creating custom applications that enhance Teams’ call flow management to place and receive calls between external and internal users.
- New industry-specific collaborative applications that go beyond the boundaries of the standard Teams interface to support a variety of industry applications.
- Single communication platform for enterprises that enables every call and message sent to be stored, managed, and discoverable within the Microsoft Teams platform.
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