January 31st, 2018

Microsoft Teams App Studio (Preview)

Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork in Office 365 that integrates with the apps and services that people use to get work done together. Microsoft Teams App Studio (Preview) makes it easy to start creating or integrating your own service, whether you develop custom apps for your enterprise or SaaS applications for teams around the world.

Teams App Studio was created to simplify and streamline the process of creating real apps. It is much faster than the manual process described in Get started with Node.js: Teams App Studio is now the recommended way to develop Teams apps. You can find getting started documentation here.

Apps for Teams are made up from two parts:

  • The functionality of the app is hosted on a web server
  • The definition of the app is contained in an application package that teams uses to find and display your app functionality. The app package is what you upload to Teams when you first test your app

The most significant part of the application package is the app manifest.

Teams App Studio streamlines the creation of the manifest for your app, and also provides some useful tools like the Card Editor and a React control library. Writing and hosting the code is still up to you.

When you press “Send me this card”, you’ll see this in the Conversation tab:

Screenshot of a card in the conversation tab

If you’d like to give the Teams App Studio a try you can install it by searching in the Teams Store or click here for the direct link.