Dev family, this is long-overdue. We know there have been some great experiences, as well as some challenging ones over the previous two years. So, let us start by saying thank you for your hard work, patience, and resilience. We’re grateful for your partnership.
It’s been quite a journey, and we are just getting started. We’ve been working hard over the last few months to make sure this community gets the attention it deserves. In the next 12 months and beyond, you’ll start to see a great deal of investment to improve the Microsoft Teams platform experience, as well as increase the visibility (read: new go-to-market opportunities) for all the apps and integrations you’ve built, and will build.
Together, we will deliver a workplace experience that our mutual customers haven’t yet imagined, enabling them to give superpowers to their people.
Here is a recap of what we announced at (and since) Ignite:
Global Microsoft Teams platform meetups
We launched our first Teams platform meetup in San Francisco on October 11th. If you’d like to get involved and host a meetup in your city, with our support, we will have a sign-up option here very soon.
Dev tool improvements
Dev tools now accessible from the Microsoft Teams desktop client
Want to get access to browser dev tools via the Teams desktop client? No problem. This feature is available in the Developer Preview version of Microsoft Teams. To access the Developer Preview, click your profile picture, and then click About > Developer Preview. Teams will restart in Developer Preview mode, and a new command will be available. For more details, check out this post. A few updates to the tools you love:
Confluence Cloud Messaging Extension empowers your team to get the information they need by searching through your Confluence instance and attaching a page, blog post, etc. to an informative card. For details, see our related blog post.
Jira Cloud app now supports Jira Service Desk projects, allowing you to configure by selecting the project, choosing which service desk queue you would like to monitor, and pinning that as a Microsoft Teams tab. For details, see our related blog post .
Introducing SharePoint Framework & Microsoft Teams integration
We also introduced the preview of a single Office 365 Platform for deploying your hosted application experience on both SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. With SharePoint Framework v1.7 and upcoming releases in Microsoft Teams, you can now share some of your best customizations across SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, including new hosting options for web parts, delivering applications with Application Pages, streaming updates with list subscriptions and more. Check out the blog for full details and this video for a tutorial.
Microsoft Teams developer platform enhancements
We announced the general availability of Adaptive Cards, which provide an interactive and flexible card system that works across Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Windows, and Cortana.
We announced the preview of Task Module Integration, enabling a popup experience using either an adaptive card or embedded web content.
We’ve made multiple Teams App Studio enhancements, enabling you to not only install and test apps, but also perform the following actions from within the app:
- Create a bot with a single click
- Register and manage your Azure AD App and Bot directly within App Studio
- Edit multiple cards via a new card editor
- Sideload and test your app conveniently with one click
.NET and Node.js support for Bot Framework 4.x is coming soon (in preview).
Deeper integration with Microsoft Graph
As we just announced, we now have several new APIs for automating team life-cycles:
- The tab creation APIs allow applications to pin themselves to team channels (complementing the existing API to install applications to teams).
- The APIs for publishing apps for your organization allow you to manage applications that are unique to your tenant.
- Extensions to existing APIs to work with application permissions, enabling applications to work with teams, channels, and apps without human intervention.
- Public preview of the calls and online meetings APIs that will allow developers to build bots that can interact with and control audio/video calls and online meetings.
- Automate the provisioning of teams in your tenantWatch this tutorial from our very own Nick Kramer to learn more about the Graph APIs just launched:
What’s coming next
- Continuation of this Teams blog, shoot me some ideas for the (working title) if you’ve got any (see below)
- New Teams Dev Center page
- The launch of Teams platform worldwide meetups
- Some of the best swag we’ve delivered, yet
- An industry-leading go-to-market program, for Teams devs
Get involved
- Sign up for the Teams developer public preview program to get early access to unreleased features in Teams.
- Register for our new Teams developer newsletter
- Give me a shout if you’d like to submit a name for this series (e.g. “The Teams Code”), as well as your (constructive) feedback, and what you want to hear about next
