Azure Boards is an agile project planning software from the technology giant Microsoft Corp. Since its inception in 1975, Microsoft has gone through many avatars and became a cloud-centric company in its last transformation. Microsoft Azure is its premier public cloud platform, providing infrastructure to host computing environments while supporting its own SaaS apps. Productivity and collaboration have been a particular focus area for Microsoft in recent years, with the launch of Teams and developer tools like Azure Boards.
Azure Boards was launched in 2018, keeping the needs of DevOps and agile project teams in mind. It enables work visualisation through Kanban boards and supports drag-and-drop sprint planning. You could think of it almost as an alternative to Trello, natively married into the Microsoft ecosystem.
Azure Boards connects with over a thousand tools, and the Microsoft Teams integration lets you combine communication and collaboration with project planning and OKR (i.e., objectives and key results) tracking. Microsoft announced the Azure Boards app for Teams in October 2019, not long after the launch of the Azure Boards product. This makes sense, as a big part of Boards’ value proposition is its ability to fit into your existing productivity workflows and facilitate project planning/tracking from virtually any platform.
Inside the Azure Boards App for Teams
To get started with the integration, you first need to contribute to a project on Azure Boards. Only users with admin privileges in Boards can create subscriptions for work items in a Teams channel. Also, third-party application access must be turned on to enable notification sharing between boards and Teams.
Once these prerequisites are in place, you can look up the app in the Microsoft Teams app store and follow the bot instructions to get up and run.
Here are the key features you can expect with Azure Boards for Teams.
- Teams channel to Azure DevOps project connectivity – The first step for using the integration is to set up a connection between an Azure DevOps project on Boards and your Microsoft Teams account. You can link multiple projects using the bot concerning the specific project URL. This will make the project available to messaging extensions, channels, and work item notifications.
- Work item creation from messages – This is a nifty feature that can make project management more efficient. When a colleague texts you with a task or a reminder, you can simply navigate to the (…) menu, choose more actions, and create a work item that will be automatically synchronised to Azure Boards.
- Work item update notifications through subscriptions in channels – As mentioned, admins can subscribe an entire channel to an Azure Boards project, ensuring that every channel member is notified when a work item in that project is changed. Regular users can choose to subscribe to specific projects, and there are filters to customise what you get notified on.
- Intuitive searchability using messaging extensions – The integration makes it possible to search for Azure Board work items within Teams using either the work item ID or its title. Once you find the work item you want, you can share it as an adaptive card via private/group chat or channel messages.
- URL link unfurling – All links to Azure Boards projects will be unfurled automatically after installing the integration. This means that you don’t have to look up a work item to refer to its details. Suppose it is open on a separate window. In that case, you can just copy-paste the link into Teams, and the integration will fetch all the necessary details (work item title, description, status, and assignee name) to kickstart a discussion.
- Azure Board bot commands – You can use a set of bot commands to perform everyday tasks on the Azure Boards app for teams. For example, you can type @azure boards create to create a work item or @azure boards unlink to remove a Boards project from a Teams channel. You can refer to Teams documentation for the full list of the eight supported bot commands.
Why the Azure Boards App Makes a Difference
The Azure Boards app is easy to use yet complete with all the necessary features. There is little to no learning curve, which is ideal for collaborations between technical and business teams.
What We Think
Companies using Azure DevOps for project management should consider the Boards+Teams combination to turbocharge productivity.
You can download the integration free of cost here.
