We are excited to join the Office team this year at Build 2017 to talk about what’s new on the Microsoft Teams developer platform. At preview, we delivered a rich platform with tabs, bots and Office 365 Connectors. Today we are announcing new features for building more engaging experiences, like compose extensions, Actionable Messages in Connectors and activity feed notifications, along with a new way to package and publish apps that makes it easy for users to discover and start using them right within Teams. These features are in developer preview now and will roll out to all users across the next month.

Compose extensions let teams bring relevant data from your service into chat conversations without switching between windows or copy-and-paste.  Similar to adding an emoji or GIF, users can include relevant data from your service in a message with a few mouse clicks. For example, imagine a team is triaging an open item from a task management app. Using compose extensions team members can quickly bring information about the item into the conversation so everyone has background context for the discussion.

Connectors provide a simple way for your service to insert notifications into a Teams channel. Now Actionable Messages in Connectors enable users to act on those notifications within the chat thread. An actionable message for task notification can allow team members to quickly respond by updating status, changing a date, or adding comments.

We’ve added third party notifications to the activity feed which tells users about recent activity in Teams and drives traffic back to your service. Updates and information from your service can now appear in the feed right next to native notifications like new @mentions, likes and replies. These notifications also trigger the same desktop and mobile notifications which help bring visibility to important information from your service.

Build a tab, bot, connector, compose extension, activity feed notification or any combination to make your service engaging and relevant for people working and collaborating in Microsoft Teams. You can package all these capabilities into a single Teams app making it simpler for you to publish and manage. In the coming weeks, users will be able to add your published apps from a new in-product discovery experience. Whether you’ve built a bot or a single Teams app with multiple capabilities, end-users will find it all in one place and when they install an app, they get all the pieces together. 

And finally, with integration into the Office Store onboarding and distribution process, Teams is now a more open platform for all developers. Building on Microsoft Teams enables you to engage your users and enable them to achieve more.

At Build today and throughout the week, you’ll hear more about the Teams developer platform. We invite you to check out these sessions on Channel 9 along with sessions from partners Wrike, Sapho and Adobe to learn more about building an app for Teams. And then start building!

-Richard Moe