Recently, MS announced that they will migrate all bots to the new Azure Bot Service by 3/31/2018.
Does it mean the end of the preview status of Bot Framework and Skype for Business channel?
Does Microsoft officially support Bot Framework and Skype for Business channel after Bot Framework is migrated to Azure?
The Bot Framework team has released the Azure Bot Service for General Availability (GA) on 2017-12-13.
You can read the full announcement article by Lili Cheng, Corporate Vice President, Artificial Intelligence and Research Group:
"Conversational AI, or making human and computer interactions more natural, has been a goal since technology became ubiquitous in our society. Our mission is to bring conversational AI tools and capabilities to every developer and every organization on the planet, and help businesses augment human ingenuity in unique and differentiated ways." - Lili Cheng
To answer your question - the preview period is over and the product is officially launched on Azure along with all the existing channels, including Skype for Business.
During the Bot Framework Preview bot registrations were managed through a dedicated Bot Portal website for development and testing purposes. The Bot Portal will continue to be available to manage and migrate existing bot registrations, as well as provide new blog posts and documentation updates available for both the new and advanced bot developers.
The bot migration process will move your bot registration from the preview site into the official Azure Bot Service. During the migration process you can choose either 1) a free messaging tier which is the same as the current registration service, as well as, 2) a new premium tier with 99.9 message delivery & uptime SLA service agreement. This includes a couple of upgrades including enhanced service availability across worldwide Azure data centers.
You can find out more about the Azure Bot Service GA here:
