Microsoft 365 Community Community Demos, 7 Jun 2022

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From YouTube: Send a SMS message with Azure Communication Services

Description

In this 10-minute developer focused demo, Dan Wahlin shows how easy it is to send an SMS message from ACS. Review 5 ACS core services, dive into the SMS service looking at 4 SMS use cases and at specific SMS features. Step through creating an ACS service in Azure Portal, creating a toll free number, adding the ACS package to project, adding a connection string to project, creating the SmsClient Object and calling Send(). Get a toll-free number for $2/month. This PnP Community demo is taken from the weekly Microsoft 365 Platform Community call recorded on June 7, 2022.

Demo Presenter
• Dan Wahlin (Microsoft) | @DanWahlin

Supporting materials
• Library - Azure Communication Services UI Library | aka.ms/acs-ui-library
Documentation - Quickstart: Send an SMS message | aka.ms/acs-sms-quickstart

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/m365/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/m365/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/m365/community

A

All right, so uh my name is dan wallin and there is a lot of cool stuff with a relatively new service up on azure called azure communication services. uh It's been out a while, but a lot of you probably haven't heard about it. So I'm going to introduce it really quick, but we're going to focus on the sms side of it. So let's go ahead and dive on in here.

A

So first off when it comes to the core services, here's what you can do with acs and I'm going to use the abbreviation here as we get going. We have voice and video, which is uh one of the really key aspects of acs from there. In addition to voice and video, you can also integrate chat.

A

Now I don't know if any of you have ever done, chat on your own, it's actually pretty challenging, so you can get chat added to an application super quickly, we're not going to go into that today, but it is one of the features now we're going to talk about sms, so we'll get into that in just a moment. Once I get through these features and you're going to see, I think it's one of the most or more easier ways of getting started with acs.

A

If you need it and we'll talk about some reasons, you might, you can also do telephony and then something called network traversal. This is uh basically, you can use nat go through firewalls and traverse carrier networks. So that's also part of this overall package.

A

Now those are the highlights, there's even more coming out, but we're going to focus obviously on the sms aspect.

A

So let me dive on into that and let's talk about some use cases, so I think we're all pretty good at sms these days and as somebody in the chat joked since my audio uh kind of went out, you might have used that to reach me. Potentially, you know who knows, but obviously marketing promotions is a big one, I'm going to argue for good and for bad.

A

There are some things I personally subscribe to where they'll send me some information about what I can do and I can get that right on my phone, so you could set that up with your apps. If you wanted, obviously alerts would be a big one. This could be everything from emergency management alerts to just alerts that a package is shipped and then, of course, you could use all kinds of customer integration scenarios as well with sms, if you needed to now.

A

In addition to that, if you needed to do two-factor authentication through sms, you could I of course prefer and recommend that folks use the authenticator type apps, but there are cases where some folks just have no choice but to use sms. My parents would be a good example, so we're going to focus on kind of how you can get started, then so here's some things you can do with this. First off, it's a very simple setup.

A

In fact, I'm going to walk you through a quick start, that's up on the docks and it's very very easy to use and get started with this as you'll see. You can also send high velocity a lot of messages at the same time. If you want there is a synchronous way you can send and an async I'll show you that coming up here and then you can even have two-way conversations.

A

So it's not like you could just send out, they could respond, and you know they might input like a number to get more information like number one or number two means or a you know a. U is I want to unsubscribe or something like that? Well, you can have those two-way conversations, there's built-in analytics and you can even have built-in opt-out handling.

A

So obviously that's a big big deal if you have a legitimate business and you're using this, which is what we're talking about and you can make it so they can opt out if you would like. uh So with that. Let me walk you through what we're going to do. I'm going to show you a little bit in the azure portal super easy to get started with this and I'll show you the basics of that in just a moment.

A

So, first off you need to go either to the azure portal or you can use the cli and you could create an acs service now, once you've done that you can then go to that service or that resource, and you can create a toll-free number now. You have to create a toll-free number for the sms functionality.

A

uh There are other numbers, though, that you can create for the telephony aspects we're not going to go into that today, but that would also be an option.

A

The toll-free number by the way, you'll see in a moment it's two dollars a month, is what it cost to have that from a pricing standpoint, I'm gonna jump right to the good stuff, so acs, as I mentioned earlier, can be used for uh audio video. It could be used for chat, it could be used for sms and even telephony features.

A

So all you'd have to do is go to the azure portal and if you just type communication, you'll see communication services and you just create a resource. It literally will take you like 30 seconds or less really really fast.

A

Now, once I've done that I can click on keys and you'll notice, I can get a connection string, I'm showing you that, because I'm going to jump right to the code now. The other thing I need for sms is: if I'm going to send an sms message, I need a phone number, so you can click on phone numbers here, and this usually takes a little bit of time to load. But eventually I already have a phone number created and I already have that in my code.

A

I'm going to show you in fact it should show you right there there's my phone number so to send sms. You need a toll-free number and, as you'll see here, it costs two dollars a month. So it's actually pretty cheap to do this part of it uh at least to get the number and host it. So that's really all I did to get started now. What I'm going to do is kind of jump on over to the code here, and I would never put my connection string in the code all right.

A

This is a demo, and this is straight from a quick start uh and I'm going to show you a link to this quick starting at the end here, we'll get back to that in a moment, but normally you'd use key vault or maybe use environment variables, whatever you use at work now. The thing I want to point out here, let me get rid of the console real quick is that this is just a net command line, app, really really simple. All right- and I have this connection string so up at the top you'll notice.

A

I have added azure communication and azure communication dot sms. Now that's a package! You can get up on nuget, azure communication sms! That's going to have this functionality now from there. What I need to do. I have this on the side.

A

So what I'm going to do is then create an sms client and I'm a var lover. So I'm going to change that, but you'll notice. I pass the connection string into the sms client, okay, pretty simple so far. Now the next thing I need to do is I need this phone number and then I need the number or numbers I want to send to now. I'm just going to send to one number here.

A

So let me show you this code all right. So this is the number that you saw previously in the azure portal, and this is what they call an e164 formatted phone number. If you want to impress friends and family about what you like what'd you learn today. Oh you know about e uh one, six, four four minute phone numbers, I'm sure they'll be very impressed and then I'm gonna send to my cell phone.

A

I decided it wasn't a good idea to put my cell phone in the video that would go out to lots of people, so it's kind of hidden down at the bottom in a function and then here's my message, hello from acs. All we're going to do from there is we're going to write out a message id. So if it works, we should get back a message id.

A

I was going to show you my phone I'll have to hold it up or something here in a moment. So, first off we went to the portal, we got a connection string once we create the resource super easy. If you've done any azure you're pretty used to that, then we set up a toll-free number that literally takes. I don't know less than five minutes. uh You do have to pick your number and then it goes out and does a search to get the number.

A

But it's very very fast and easy all can be done through the portal on that and then we fire up our sms client and we call send now I'm doing a synchronous, one. Obviously for a more robust scenario, you would do a send async and they do have async functionality. So you can take advantage of that all right. So with that in place, let's go ahead and we'll do a net run and kind of while that's running I'm gonna just to speed things up.

A

I'm gonna show you a couple other things I'll have a link for this, uh because that'll take just a moment to compile and then hopefully do the send here. So I mentioned earlier that, in addition to sms there's telephony features, there's audio video features. You can embed just like teams, but you can embed it right in your custom. App just like you see here they have a nice little playground where you can play around with that and use that connection string. I showed you the code I'm walking through now.

A

I did c sharp, but you'll notice. They also have javascript java python. This is a quick start. I have a video here. You can go watch that and it'll walk you through all this code and then, of course you can pick your language and I'll show you those links here in just a moment, but let's go on back okay, so it looks like it worked. So we got back a message id on my phone says hello from acs.

A

It did work, it did work so literally. That's how easy it is to send an sms message from acs super cool and everything. I just showed you here can be found in this quick start, so let me wrap up by giving you a couple links here.

A

You can get to the acs this acs sms, quick, start link that will get you to the quick start and then, if you want to get to kind of the playground area, you know, maybe you want to play with the chat functionality or the audio video functionality whatever it may be. You can go to this link here and that's it for me folks, thanks so I'll turn it back over to you visa.

B

Excellent, thank you dan, really, really cool stuff I mean and having a short video is always good because it shows the simplicity of actually using that api like in this case it's really really really cool stuff. So awesome, stuff.