Enable File Sharing with the Azure Communication Services UI Library and Azure Blob Storage

Azure Communication Services allows you to add communications to your applications to help you connect with your customers and across your teams.  Available capabilities include voice, video, chat, SMS and more. Frequently you need to share media, such as a Word document, an image, or a video as part of your communication experience.  During a meeting, users want to share, open, or download the media directly. This content can be referenced throughout the conversation for visibility and feedback – whether it is a doctor sending a patient a note in a PDF, a retailer sending detailed images of their product, or a customer sharing a scanned financial document with their advisor.

As part of the Azure Family, Azure Communication Services works together with Azure Blob Storage to share media between communication participants. Azure Blob Storage provides you with globally redundant, scalable, encrypted storage for your content and Azure Communication Services allow you to deliver that content.

Using Azure Communication Services chat SDK and the UI Library, developers can easily enable experiences that incorporate chat communications and media sharing into your existing applications. Check out the recently published tutorial and reference implementation. You can find the completed sample on GitHub.

This tutorial covers how to upload media to Azure Blob Storage and link it to your Azure Communication Services chat messages.  Going one step further, the guide shows you how to use the Azure Communication Services UI Library to create a beautiful chat user experience which includes these file sharing capabilities. You can even stylize the UI components using the UI library’s simple interfaces to match your existing app.  

The tutorial yields a sample of how file sharing capability can be enabled. You should ensure that the file system used and the process of uploading and downloading files to be compliant with your requirements related to privacy and security. 

We hope you check out the tutorial to learn how you can bring interactive communication and media sharing experiences to your application using Azure Communication Services.