Microsoft Teams extends workplace chat, meetings, calling, and file sharing from within a single interface. The popular team collaboration app also enables organizations to leverage the apps they need to get work done in a fast and productive way. “That’s why people customize Teams with apps,” added Nicole Herskowitz, Microsoft Teams General Manager, in a recent blog post.
That same blog post noted, as we reported earlier this month, that Microsoft was announcing the general availability of Teams apps for meetings, a functionality set to help the company catch up with the likes of Slack and Zoom. The launch of Teams apps for meetings coincides with the release of 20 new apps built for enhanced meeting experiences. Located within the Teams app store, users can access Asana, Monday.com, Slido, ServiceNow and Teamflect, as well as Microsoft-developed apps like Forms, which enables polling, surveys, etc.
Herskowitz said the goal in launching the newly-available Teams apps for meetings is to make meetings more productive and engaging. Leveraging the Power Automate app for Teams, users gain access to a simplified workflow designer along with various templates so they can automate repetitive tasks. Via the Power Virtual Agents app for Teams, you can now build, deploy, and manage low code bots that help with a range of scenarios, like IT helpdesk, FAQs, and HR issues; to name a few. These apps are all generally available. According to Herskowitz:
“You can build, deploy, and manage the experience – all without leaving Teams”
To make this a reality, Herskowitz said that Microsoft combined the capabilities of its Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Teams. Now available at your fingertips, or at least from the comfort of the Teams client is Power Apps app for Teams, which provides a maker studio where you can manage app data and more. You can even build and change your app’s user interface.
And then there was Dataverse for Teams, formerly ‘Project Oakdale,’ – the data management tool lets you manage app data more effectively, and it is now in general availability. The offering supports app data management by letting users find, filter, and sort organizational data. It includes support for basic data types, as well as complex data, like images and files, according to Marc Mercuri, Principal Product PM, Microsoft Dataverse, Microsoft Teams.
I reached out to Angela Ashenden, Principal Analyst, Workplace Transformation, CCS Insight, who said: “Microsoft Teams used to support the creation of apps only within channels. For example, as bots in chat discussions to deliver notifications from third-party apps into Teams.” According to Ashenden, CCS Insight has seen the usage of Microsoft Teams grow a lot over the last couple of years. She added, there was a massive spike during the pandemic. Today, Microsoft claims its Teams app has 115 million daily active users.
“The bulk of that activity remains in meetings rather than in channels to support business processes. The adoption of apps in channels has remained low so far.” She believes the goal is for Microsoft to make Microsoft Teams the central part of a typical user’s day, and believes the move is an important one in the collaboration giant’s ongoing battle with Slack and Zoom. But Slack already has a strong and established presence enabling channel-based apps. Elaborating, she added: “This is one of the areas Slack continues to differentiate from Teams – partly for the extensive portfolio of third-party apps, and partly for the high level of adoption of apps by customers.”
She believes this is one reason Slack users are more loyal than Teams users because the collaboration app is more embedded in their workflows. Zoom also provides a similar experience, since it launched Zoom Apps at last October’s Zoomtopia event.
“This is an interesting new area of competition, and the key to success is for the integrations to add value without introducing too much complexity into the experience”
