Microsoft Teams is the new star in collaboration tool heaven. With Microsoft Teams, communication within a company, whether via video, voice or text messages, is significantly simplified and improved.

Microsoft Teams fits perfectly into the Office 365 ecosystem and is inherently linked to Office 365 Groups, SharePoint and Planner. Not surprisingly, Microsoft Teams is the fastest growing business application in Microsoft’s history.

Teams as a platform for business applications

Microsoft Teams is also a platform for your own business applications. The solution can be extended in various ways. These extensions can be installed within the company or made accessible to other customers via the store.

With Microsoft Teams the business application is executed where the user navigates during his daily work. It is therefore naturally embedded in the user’s daily work tool. The Microsoft Teams App can also be easily personalized and configured to simplify routine tasks for the user.

Extensibility

Microsoft Teams offers various expansion options, which I would like to discuss briefly below:

Bots

Smart bots can be connected to Microsoft teams. The user can naturally communicate with the bot via text messages or voice. This enables very intuitive and innovative access to an existing business application.

Teams Tab

Web content can be displayed in a Team Tab. This can be an existing internal web application or a specific view for Microsoft Teams.

Connectors

Connectors allow external systems to publish information to Microsoft teams.

Activity Feed

The Activity Feed is the inbox for the user. A business application can specifically notify individual users.

Messaging Extensions

Messaging Extensions can improve the user experience. The Team App suggests options to the user or provides an inline search.

Backend

The backend of the application can be operated on any platform. It can be an Azure Web App, a SharePoint Framework (SPFx) Web Part, or an existing Web application in the cloud or in its own data center.

Store

In addition to the development of specialist applications for the company itself, a store is also available. An application published here is available to 135 million users in 329,000 companies – a huge potential. In addition to the Team Store, a team application can also be made available in the AppSource app store.

Starting Point

Microsoft provides an extensive developer documentation.