Microsoft Teams Receives App-Focused UpdateMicrosoft Teams Receives App-Focused Update
Adds a slew of homegrown and third-party integrations, goes GA with tools for custom app development
November 17, 2020
Microsoft this week revealed a series of Teams updates, including new integrated apps and the general availability of developer tools.
First, Microsoft added about 20 apps that allow users to augment the Teams experience with its own or third-party services, according to a blog post by Nicole Herskowitz, Microsoft Teams GM. Some of the apps now available for integration include:
Asana — a work management tool that translates Teams conversations into Asana tasks, tracks follow-up meetings, and delivers notifications in a private My Tasks channel
Monday.com — a project management tool that allows users to collaborate on monday.com boards, track notes, assign tasks, and search boards and tasks within Teams
Talview — a recruitment chatbot that allows hiring managers to view and schedule live interviews or proctored exams
xMatters — a digital service availability platform that features incident reporting and can provide on-call resources to address technology issues
To use these integrated Teams apps, users need an active account for the third-party service, Microsoft said. For a full list of all the Teams apps, click here.
Besides supporting integration with hundreds of its own and external apps, Microsoft enables developers to create custom apps for Teams through its Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Toward that end, it continues to enhance the developer toolkits introduced in July at Microsoft Inspire, and has revamped the integration between Teams app development and the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) used by SharePoint developers, Herskowitz said.
Lastly, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents apps for Teams, all introduced at Inspire, are now generally available for use in building low-code apps, designing workflows, and creating and deploying bots within Teams, Herskowitz said. Additionally, Microsoft Dataverse for Teams, a low-code data platform for building and deploying apps and chatbots in Teams, is now available too. Dataverse for Teams allows for application lifecycle management and control over the data used to build apps and workflows in Teams.
