Microsoft to make Teams more tech-friendly

New Delhi MICROSOFT has made it super easy for developers to build collaborative apps for Teams and Microsoft 365.

During its Build 2021 developer conference on Tuesday, the company announced new features that will enable them to build richer meeting experiences into their apps for Teams meetings.

Available in preview, shared stage integration provides developers access to the main stage in a Teams meeting through a simple configuration in their app manifest.

"This provides a new surface to enable real-time, multi-user collaboration experiences for your meetings apps, such as whiteboarding, design, project boards, and more," said Nicole Herskowitz, General Manager, Microsoft Teams.

Also available in preview, developers can enable the automation of meeting-related workflows through events such as meeting start and meeting end — with many more event APIs planned to come out later this year.

"Coming this summer, Together mode extensibility lets you create and share your own custom scenes for Teams meetings. This provides an easy design experience, within the Developer Portal for Teams, so developers can craft custom scenes to make meetings more engaging and personalised for your organisation," Microsoft informed.

With collaborative apps, end users can easily work with others to complete their projects at any time, from anywhere, and stay in the flow of work without needing to switch across multiple apps and data.

"Easily integrate your existing apps solutions with Teams and use standard web technologies, JavaScript, and just a few Teams APIs to integrate into Teams messages, channels, and meetings quickly and easily, said the company.

"Fluid components in Microsoft Teams is now available in private preview and will expand to more customers in the coming months," it added.

Fluid components in Teams chat allow end users to send a message with a table, action items, or a list that can be co-authored and edited by everyone in line and that is shareable across Office applications like Outlook.

Message extensions will soon be supported in Outlook. When users compose a message, they will be able to select a new menu of search-based message extensions to choose from.

For example, a user may be able to compose an email and then select a message extension that surfaces tasks from their Teams app to send to teammates.

The company said that Microsoft Cloud offers a full stack of technologies to build collaborative apps.