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- shawnhenry
Microsoft
Microsoft Teams is a software offering (SaaS) through Microsoft 365 and Azure Communication Services is a communication platform as a service (PaaS), offered through Azure. The primary differences between the two are:
- Microsoft Teams is used through an end-user license whereas Azure Communications is billed on a consumption basis through an Azure account
- Microsoft Teams is closely tied to a Microsoft 365 identity and the M365 ecosystem. With Azure Communication Service developers bring their own their own identity system (like MSA, Facebook, or even nothing!)
- Microsoft Teams is focused primarily on end-users (although there’s extensive developer extensibility) whereas Azure Communication Service is a platform for software developers
- Looking for some feedback on this as well. In re-creating the calling and messaging aspects of Teams, we wanted to add some cognitive services like transcription, and a calendar component. With auto-transcription coming to Teams, and the Shifts component being only available through Teams, how do we approach this properly so that Teams isn't the solution our partner lands on?
Azure Communication Services is a platform offering - so if it better suited your needs to build out Shifts functionality on top of your custom application you could do that. Because we are a platform you can also plug into other services like Azure Cognitive Services. You can see an example of how someone was using sentiment analysis with SMS messages here.
It's hard to give guidance without knowing your entire scenario, but it sounds like Teams Interop scenarios might be helpful for your situation.
Teams Interop let's custom applications using the Azure Communication Services calling SDK, join a Teams meeting. This is useful when you want to keep some people (perhaps within your organization) within the Teams context to take advantage of different Teams features, but still have a need for a custom application and might have guests/other customers joining from the Azure Communication Services calling client.
As for other features, we are still a relatively new service and are still building out more functionality on top of our calling service 🙂 Hope this helps!
