Microsoft’s Build 2017 conference is in full swing and we are seeing the company make a lot of interesting announcements, as well as clear a lot of pent-ups that were long overdue. Along the same, Microsoft has announced that all developers will now be able to publish their Microsoft Teams app through the Office Store.
The company added that all the applications published through this means will be surfaced through an all new, Discover Apps experience.
Teams is important to Microsoft. After all, that is exactly what the company is hoping to offer to customers against Slack and Facebook’s offering for Workplaces. Microsoft is deeply involved with enterprises and offices through the wide variety of tools it offers (such as powerpoint, word, excel and so on) and as such, it will be a huge letdown if it loses out to Slack or Facebok in enterprise communication.
Which is why the company has been attempting to make the experience it offers more useful through integrations with Microsoft’s other applications. Teams for instance, can work with Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint and Power BI and over 150 other third party applications that can come in handy in a workplace.
At Build 2017, Microsoft added upon these capabilities with features like Support for tabs and Cortana integrations. At the event, Microsoft demoed how all these different applications and experiences could work together to provide a seamless experience to the end user. The Cotana integration for instance, could display action items upon employee screens that could display important summaries when clicked upon.
Microsoft also announced a couple of new features that will soon be making their way to Teams in developer preview. First up is the compose extensions which will allow users to send out commands that will pull information for other apps and services, within their Teams chat. So basically, you can pull in extra information without ever having to leave your chat screen.
The next feature now available in developer preview is the ability to alert users of updates and other important stuff in their activity feed. Developers will receive access to new Teams APIs which will also let them access team and channel information.
The features will start rolling out to all users, next month.
