Azure Communication Services Teams Interop for Meetings is now GA, new libraries

As promised at Ignite 2021, Microsoft has removed the Beta tag from the Teams Interop feature that allows Azure Communication Services clients to join Microsoft Teams meetings as guest users.

The change was made on Friday, with the documentation page being updated to remove the Preview warning, and via a small announcement on the Azure Updates blog.

There are also updated NPM packages for anyone looking to implement this now that’s it is GA, so it’s worth making sure you are using the latest version. For @azure/communication-calling, this is version 1.3.2. This release is not marked as -prerelease so you should get it on a simple update.

Goodbye, Scott

In related news, Scott Van Vliet announced that he is going to be leaving his Corporate Vice President position at Microsoft in the New Year, to explore new opportunities outside of the company. Over the past 4 years, Scott has led the IC3 team (the technology being ACS and Teams voice/video/messaging) and really been the public face for IC3 and ACS (his video is still the one linked by today’s announcement!) and so I feel that, as developers who will now be able to take ACS and do great things with it, we owe Scott a debt of gratitude for the work he has done in bringing this to reality, particularly through such an overwhelmingly busy time for the team. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on what Scott does next: he hasn’t announced what that is yet, other than saying that it is “out of this world”, so maybe we’ll see him show up at Space X or a similar company?