Azure Communication Services April 2024 Feature Updates

The Azure Communication Services team is excited to share several new product and feature updates released in March 2024. (You can view previous blog articles here.)  

See this month’s updates below:

• Calling to Microsoft Teams Call Queues and Auto Attendants
• Email Updates: SMTP, Opt-out options, and more

Calling to Microsoft Teams Call Queues and Auto Attendants

Azure Communication Services Calling to Teams call queues and auto attendants and click-to-call for Teams Phone are now generally available. Organizations can enable customers to easily reach their sales and support members on Microsoft Teams with just a single click. By adding a click-to-call widget onto a website, such as a “Sales” button that points to a sales department, or a “Purchase” button that points to procurement, customers are just one click away from a direct connection into a Teams call queue or auto attendant.

You can learn more about joining your calling app to a Teams call queue or auto attendant, and about building contact center applications in our documentation.

Email Updates

There were several updates to Azure Communication Services Email service in March.

• SMTP
• Opt-out management
• PowerShell cmdlets
• CLI extension

SMTP

Azure Communication Services Email’s SMTP as a Service is now generally available. developers can use the SMTP support in Azure Communication Services to send emails easily, improve security features, and have more control over outgoing communications. The SMTP Relay Service acts as a link between email clients and mail servers and helps deliver emails more effectively. It sets up a specialized relay infrastructure that not only handles higher throughput needs and successful email delivery, but also improves authentication to protect communication. Moreover, this service offers businesses a centralized platform that lets them manage outgoing emails for all B2C communications and get insights into email traffic.

With this capability, customers can switch from on-premises SMTP solutions or link their line of business applications to a cloud-based solution platform with Azure Communication Services Email. This specifically enables:

• Secure and reliable SMTP endpoint with TLS 1.2 encryptions
• Access with Microsoft Entra Application Id to secure authentication for sending emails using SMTP.
• High volume sending support for B2C communications using SMTP and REST APIs.
• The security and compliance to honor and respect data handling and privacy requirements that Azure promises to our customers.

You can learn more about SMTP as a Service in our documentation.

Opt-out Management

Azure Communication Service Email opt-out management, now in public preview, offers a powerful platform with a centralized managed unsubscribe list with opt-out preferences saved to our data store. This feature helps developers meet guidelines of email providers who often require one-click list-unsubscribe implementation in the emails sent from their platforms. To proactively identify and avoid significant delivery problems, suppression list features help improve reputation and helps customers to easily manage opt-outs and maintain compliance.

Get started with Managing emails opt out  today.

PowerShell Cmdlets & CLI extension

PowerShell Cmdlets

To enhance the developer experience, Azure Communication Services is introducing more PowerShell cmdlets and Azure CLI extensions for working with Azure Communication Service Email.

With the addition of these new cmdlets developers can now use Azure PowerShell cmdlets for all CRUD operations for Email Service including:

• Create Communication Service Resource (existing)
• Create Email Service Resource (new)
• Create Domain (Azure Managed or Custom Domain) Resource (new)
• Initiate/Cancel Custom Domain verification (new)
• Add a sender username to a domain (new)
• Link a Domain Resource to a Communication Service Resource (exiting)

You can learn more in the PowerShell cmdlets documentation.

Azure CLI extension for Email Service Resources management

With the addition of these new extensions developers can now use Azure CLI for their end to end send email flow including:

• Create Communication Service Resource (existing)
• Create Email Service Resource (new)
• Create Domain (Azure Managed or Custom Domain) Resource (new)
• Add a sender username to a domain (new)
• Link a Domain Resource to a Communication Service Resource (exiting)
• Send an Email (existing)

You can learn more about this in our Extensions documentation.

You can learn more about these updates and Azure Communications Services Communication Platform as a Service in our overview.