Teams now sports a Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code Teams extension to streamline the app publishing process. There are several Power integrations as well, spanning Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, Power Automate, and Power BI.
Microsoft Teams Graph also gets an uplift with new APIs for Teams, Shifts, and in-app notifications. Don’t miss the:
1. New low code bots
2. App Studio V1.4.0
IT admins gain smarter controls for app management
At Build 2020, Microsoft announced several updates specially geared for Teams administrators. The app management experience is dramatically improved, and there are new controls for app discoverability. The latter will help admins carefully fashion the end-user experience to surface relevant apps. We also liked:
3. A third-party subscription purchase experience
4. The ability to grant Graph API permissions on behalf of the entire tenant
The UX sees useful tweaks
No Microsoft Teams edition is complete without additions to the end-user experience. This year, we saw several significant changes that are sure to improve your productivity when using Teams.
For example, Teams chat will soon have messaging actions (forward, save, etc.), mimicking the smartphone experience. Also, team owners can act as limited admins to install and restrict an app to their team members. There are a couple of nifty updates for Azure + Teams policy settings. The highlights to look out for are:
5. Templates for common team types like bank branch, event management, pricing response
6. Microsoft Lists in Teams, which is like a pro-planner for power users
7. Contextual search to find content in a specific channel or chat
8. Pop-out apps to continue working in Teams without closing background conversations
Teams users can now reach external audiences
Teams was initially envisioned as an internal chat app for impromptu communication – today, we have gone far beyond this use case. Companies around the world use Microsoft Teams to meet a variety of needs, and this includes communicating with external users.
To enable this, Microsoft has launched virtual appointment support with Bookings in Teams. This is particularly useful for healthcare professionals (Teams is already HIPAA and HITRUST compliant). Two updates that caught out attention our:
9. Bookings app integration to manage multiple departments and staff
10. Skype TX interop and New Network Device Interface (NDI) support for video broadcasting
Microsoft Teams Build 2020 edition is a major update. It addresses the needs of a basic, casual user, just like it factors in more complex organisations with layered collaboration needs. Stay tuned as we break down each of these features to find out how they revolutionise your collaboration experience.
