Weekly Update 8 September 2025 – Graph Retirements, Dev Proxy v1.0, ACS Teams Phone extensibility GA

This week:

Microsoft Graph CLI retirement

Microsoft Graph Toolkit retirement

Dev Proxy v1.0 with new features for building robust AI-powered apps

General Availability of Teams Phone extensibility

You can also listen to the audio-only version of this episode: Thoughtstuff Podcast – Tom Morgan on Teams Dev: Weekly Update 8 September 2025.

Find all my videos at thoughtstuff.co.uk/videos. You can also subscribe to the audio-only version of these videos, either via iTunes, Spotify or your own podcasting tool.

Transcript (AI-generated):

Hello and welcome to another weekly update. I hope you’re doing well.

It’s been a little while. I’ve been away for holidays, so we’ve taken a break over August. This is the first one back after then. I think I did the right thing by taking a break, because there hasn’t been loads and loads of things happening. Some things have, and we’ll talk through those.

It’s taken a little while to surface updates. Microsoft’s fiscal year begins in July, and they’re a big company. Programs get funded at the start of the fiscal year, and work only happens once funding is allocated. Around July, internal decisions are made about program funding, so it takes time for those to filter out and result in public announcements. A few of the things we’ll talk about today are likely a result of that cycle.

Major Retirements

First up, the Microsoft Graph CLI is being retired. It’s going away. Microsoft is essentially saying – we’re not funding this anymore. The full retirement will occur around the end of August next year. Until then, there will be no new features, only critical security patches. At the point of retirement, the CLI will go fully open source. You can view this positively as an opportunity for the community to maintain it, or negatively as Microsoft stepping away from support. Either way, it’s happening.

Also being retired is the Microsoft Graph Toolkit. I’ve talked about this one perhaps even more than the CLI. The Toolkit has been great for building POCs and getting people started with Graph. It retires at the end of August 2026, giving us more time. Again, no further changes expected.

This possibly reflects a broader strategy across M365 development – a shift toward Copilot extensibility over traditional non-Copilot Graph UI tools. I personally think there’s a place for both – Copilot is valuable, but visual UIs serve an important function too. This one hits a bit harder, and I’ve got some rework to do in demos.

Positive Momentum – Dev Proxy v1.0

Now, some good news – Dev Proxy has hit v1.0! There’s a blog post that goes through all the details, and there’s already a 1.1 release out as well. This is big news because many enterprises were waiting for a version 1 before adopting.

I’m happy to see Dev Proxy continuing to receive support and investment into this fiscal year. The tool is pivoting toward enabling AI workloads and Copilot extensions — things like OpenAI spec generation, token-based rate limiting simulation, and more robust debugging tooling.

Dev Proxy continues to be a tool that solves current developer needs in near real time. A great sign for its future and for developers building modern M365 solutions.

Teams Phone Extensibility Now Generally Available

The other big thing that happened recently was the GA release of Teams Phone Extensibility. This lets you embed phone system features into apps using Azure Communication Services. It’s not a product – it’s a toolkit for developers to integrate with Microsoft Teams and build out contact center solutions.

You can stream audio to Azure AI Speech, get text transcriptions back, do analysis, and much more. This is powerful capability for enterprises needing custom telephony features. I’ve covered it in the past, but now it’s fully production-ready.

Upcoming Speaking Engagement

Before Ignite hits, I’ll be speaking at Collab Days Bletchley Park on September 24th. It’s at the National Museum of Computing in the UK. I’ll be talking all about building extensibility using Copilot and declarative agents.

Final Notes

Hope you’ve had a good and relaxing summer if you had time off. We’re now entering a high-activity phase leading up to December, with major conferences and announcements on the way. Exciting times ahead!

Whatever you’re working on, have a great week and I’ll speak to you soon.