Introducing Microsoft Teams App Camp

Bob German

Learn how to build applications for Microsoft Teams and how to sell them in the Microsoft Teams App Store at the Microsoft Teams App Camp, which launches today at https://aka.ms/app-camp!

Teams App Camp is an on-demand workshop complete with videos and hands-on labs in which you’ll extend a simple web application to become a full-featured Microsoft Teams application, complete with a sample license service based on Microsoft’s Commercial Marketplace. It doesn’t assume any prior Microsoft knowledge. All the code is in vanilla JavaScript with no special tools. If you know JavaScript, you can learn how Teams apps work at their core and apply your learning to any environment and tool chain.

App Camp Labs

The Microsoft Teams app model is designed to make it easy for software vendors to reuse their application features and code. Ordinary web pages can be exposed as tabs and dialogs in Microsoft Teams, and web services can be updated to communicate with Teams using Microsoft Graph and the Azure Bot Framework. Although Microsoft has a great tool (Teams Toolkit) for generating new Teams applications, many developers already have an application they want to extend rather than starting over. Others want complete control over their tool chain and need to understand how Teams apps work without any specific tooling. That’s why Teams App Camp is designed to be technically agnostic except for the parts needed to integrate with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365.

The App Camp labs will guide you step-by-step to set up a starting application and then extend it to a Teams application complete with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) single sign-on. Once you have this basic “core” application working, you can “choose your own adventure” and add features such as dialogs, deep links, meeting apps, and messaging extensions.

There are two choices for the starting application: one if you want to learn to extend an application that already uses Azure AD, and another if you want to learn to extend an application that uses another identity system. This demonstrates an account linking pattern which many apps have been successful with. Users transparently log into the Teams application with Azure AD single sign-on (SSO), yet their profiles and permissions stay the same as when they log into the application directly.

App Camp Videos

The App Camp videos include content for business and technical audiences:

Business Briefing

  • Meena Millman, Microsoft Director of Strategic Teams Partnerships, explains the business opportunity for startups (or any software vendor!) to build and grow on Microsoft Teams.
  • Masako Kodama, Microsoft Director of Commercial Marketplace, explains the Teams marketplace and how you can harness Microsoft’s sales and partner network and ecommerce engine to sell your application. She also explains the ISV Benefits Program (https://aka.ms/modernworkisv), which provides incentives for partners to build monetized Teams applications.
  • James Skay, Sr. Product Manager for Microsoft Teams engineering, shows the Teams app buyer experience for both end users and administrators.
  • Tomomi Imura, Microsoft 365 Cloud Advocate, shows where your application can appear in the Teams user interface through a fun sketch tour of Teams app capabilities.
  • Teams’ application success stories are included.

Technical Briefing – Building a Teams application

  • Rabia Williams and Bob German, Microsoft Cloud Developer Advocates, explain the Teams application architecture and Azure Active Directory to provide a foundation for understanding the App Camp labs.
  • A video accompanies each lab so you can learn more details and see the expected results and any tricky parts.

Technical Briefing – Monetizing a Teams application

  • James Skay, Sr. Product Manager for Microsoft Teams engineering, walks you through the 5 steps to monetize your Teams application.
  • David Starr, Principal Software Engineer for Commercial Marketplace Solutions, explains the anatomy of a SaaS (software as a service) Offering, which is the ecommerce side of a monetized Teams application. He explains how developers can integrate with the Commercial Marketplace to sell subscriptions to their applications in the Teams app store.

See you at App Camp!

At the completion of App Camp, you’ll have a working Teams application running in your own Microsoft 365 Developer tenant. And you’ll know how it works and how to plug it into Microsoft’s ecommerce machine. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to build revenue-generating apps and sell them to the enormous Microsoft Teams user base.

Camp is open now – come on in! 

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