Ignite 2022: Highlights for Microsoft Teams app builders

Rabia Williams

October 19th, 20220 1

Last week at Ignite 2022, we shared several new capabilities and improvements to the Microsoft 365 developer platform to help Microsoft Teams app builders. They’re designed to help you seamlessly integrate your evolving workflows and collaboration patterns across Teams, Outlook and Office.com. We’ve put together a “highlight reel” of the most interesting announcements for Microsoft 365 app developers. Here’s an overview of what’s new.

Extending apps to Office Android (Public Preview)

At Build 2022, we announced the general availability of the Microsoft Teams JS SDK v2 and manifest enabling developers to extend Teams apps to other Microsoft 365 host apps like Outlook and Microsoft 365.

Until now, developers could only extend these apps to Teams mobile, but not beyond. At Ignite 2022, this changed. We announced that apps – specifically personal tabs – built with the Microsoft Teams JS SDK and manifest are now automatically available on Office mobile for Android devices.

Running personal tab apps on Office Android is in public preview. It’s currently available to users who are members of the Office Insiders program and have office mobile for Android from the Beta Channel.

The same capability will be available on Outlook mobile soon. This will give developers the ability to reach even more preview users to gather feedback for their app’s experience on mobile.

Here is a quick demo of an app (you may recall it from Build 2022) now working on an Android Office device.

Northwind Orders sample app running in Office and Outlook Android apps

To learn more about running your app on Android, check out this blog by Sanjay Joshi

Link unfurling (Public Preview)

We announced that search-based message extensions in Teams can light up in Outlook at Build 2022. We are excited to share Public Preview for link unfurling in Outlook, which we announced at Ignite last week. Now, users can insert links that unfurl into actionable rich preview cards for additional context and workflow completion without context switching.

Developers can leverage a huge user base in Outlook with their apps that already have search-based message extensions with actionable cards capability, with zero technical investment.

We have rolled out link unfurling in Outlook for Web and Outlook for Windows users who are enrolled in the Microsoft 365 Targeted Release program or are members of the Office Insiders program and have Outlook for Windows installed from the Beta Channel.

Let’s look at the demo of the Northwind app, to see link unfurling in action in Outlook:

Northwind Orders sample’s web URL link unfurls in Outlook for web

Learn more about this announcement in this detailed blog by Namrata Khubchandani

SharePoint Framework solutions in Outlook & Office (Public Preview)

SharePoint Framework is the easiest way to build enterprise solutions in Microsoft 365. It comes with automatic hosting, single sign-on (SSO) and industry standard web stack tooling.

You can now build SharePoint Framework solutions that work across Microsoft 365 services like Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Office.com using SharePoint Framework (SPFx). Customers and partners with current investments in SPFx in Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Viva, and SharePoint can easily extend their apps to reach even more users than ever!

Here is a demo of the same SPFx solution working in SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Office.com without actual code changes by maximizing the value of developer investments. How exciting!

Lead dashboard SharePoint Framework app working in SharePoint, Teams, Office.com and Outlook

Teams Toolkit General Availability

Teams Toolkit helps developers create new experiences in Teams and accelerate into production. You can create, debug, test and distribute your application right from the editor. It includes a few template options that jumpstart integrating Teams with your business processes and workflows.

Earlier this year, we announced the integration of Teams Toolkit in Visual Studio Code, our source code editor for JavaScript and web developers, along with a preview integration with Visual Studio 2022, our industry-leading integrated development environment (IDE) – making it easier – and even more awesome to build a Teams app.

Learn more:

What’s next

As you can see, we’ve made significant investments in the tools and technology that allow you to build one Teams app that can work seamlessly in multiple places – Outlook, Teams, and Microsoft 365. We’re not done. We’re working on full support for Outlook and Office add-ins using the same manifest.

We’re planning to fully support add-ins for Outlook and Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in the same model with built-in backward compatibility. In fact, you can explore the new add-in manifest for Outlook in public preview today.

Visit our Microsoft 365 Dev Center for the latest information on our tools and technologies. And you can follow us on @Microsoft365Dev)/Twitter to keep apprised of our announcements.

Happy coding!