Teams App Dev Challenge winner brings high quality training into Microsoft Teams

Bob German

April 5th, 20220 0

Learn from the community is a series of articles to highlight real-life project scenarios covered in Show & Tell interviews at Microsoft 365 Developer YouTube. It’s a great opportunity for me to inspire you with the end-to-end solutions built upon Microsoft Cloud and help you for your next project with useful resources.

This article highlights an application called EdMill from a French ISV called My Serious Game. Last year EdMill won the title of “Best Education App” in Microsoft’s Teams App Development Challenge.

EdMill is a solution that’s mainly used to provide internal training for companies. The name EdMill comes from “Ed” for Education and “Mill” as a place where raw materials turn into finished goods. As this suggests, the application helps customers quickly turn raw learning content into high-quality training that can be shared with users, including follow-ups to ensure they retain what they’ve learned.

With EdMill, allow anybody can create online training content. The tool leads content creators step-by-step through the process of identifying who the learners are, specify learning goals, and how success can be measured. Users receive evaluations 15, 30, 60, or 90 days after they complete the training.

Learners can access the training in Microsoft Teams. This not only saves them extra steps and logins and allows placing training directly in a Team to encourage collaboration about the lessons content. It allows training to be included directly in the Teams who use it.

Teams applications use the same technology and code as a web site, so the EdMill team was able to adapt their existing web application without rewriting everything. This reduced their development time significantly.

The My Serious Game development team reported that a big learning from the project is that “done” is better than “perfect”, so rather than trying to port all the application features to work in Teams, they focused on the portion of their application that was used by more people (learners) and who would benefit most from Teams’ collaboration features. Going forward, they said they’d like to take advantage of more Teams development features such as push notifications, bots, and adaptive cards. Also, they’ve started using Microsoft Teams in other projects as well.

Please watch the video for a demo of EdMill, and to meet the development team! For more details on EdMill, you can visit the web site at https://www.edmill.com/.