At Ignite 2018, we announced the preview of the calling and online meetings APIs , which enabled developers to interact and integrate with Microsoft Teams calling and online meetings capabilities. Now renamed the cloud communications APIs, we’re excited to announce that the first set of APIs is generally available through Microsoft Graph v1.0!

If you’re a student, a small-scale developer, or an enterprise developer, Microsoft Graph cloud communications APIs are your one-stop shop for building communications-related applications and solutions in Microsoft Teams.

Get started

To learn more about the cloud communications APIs, see the Overview topic, where we introduce concepts to get you off the ground. You’ll also find additional information like platform limits and other how-to content.

Develop

To simplify the developer experience and help you onboard quickly to our communications platform, we recommend that you use the following SDKs:

• Stateless signaling SDK
• Stateful signaling SDK
• Media SDK

Platform capabilities

The following are the core platform capabilities that we’ve made available as a part of this release.

Calling

You can build solutions integrating into:

• Peer-to-peer (P2P) or 1-1 Calls – A setup where your application interacts directly with a Teams user; for example, a help desk or customer service assistant bot answering simple questions.

• Group calls – A setup where your application interacts with two or more users (with at least one user using Teams); for example, a contact center bot routing calls to agents using Teams.

Two types of media choices are available for these calls:

• Application-hosted media – This is also known as local media. Using the Media SDK, a raw stream of media (Audio or Video) of a P2P or group call is available to the application for in-call and post-call processing. For example, a call recording bot can record calls, store the file in different clouds, and process it using cognitive services to transcribe, translate the call, or detect fraudulent activities in the call.

• Service-hosted media – This is also known as remote media. In this case, the application uses Microsoft Media Services to play the audio file. For example, an IVR bot can provide a link to a prompt file for the communications platform to play the file in the call. 

You’ll need application permissions to be granted by the tenant admin. After the permissions are granted, you can control the following two primary resources using these methods:

• Call
• Participant

The following samples are a great way to get familiar with these controls:

• Local media sample
• Remote media sample

Online meetings

You can embed online meeting generation controls in your websites and use this API to retrieve a meeting link. For example, a hospital offering telehealth services can embed controls in their website to generate a Teams meeting link for its patients to meet their doctors (and vice versa) online.

You’ll need  user permissions  to use these APIs. After the permissions are granted, you can control the following resource using these methods:

• onlineMeeting

Limits

For information about limits, see the API limits topic.

Next steps

We’re excited to see our community grow with the launch of these APIs and we’re eager to see how we can continue to improve.

• Try out our (user) APIs through Graph explorer.
• Read our documentation.
• Post issues or questions on GitHub.
• Send us feedback and suggestions through UserVoice.