Improved creation and use of business applications within Teams
Microsoft Teams has established itself this year as a key tool for the coordination and development of remote work. Once companies have adapted to this new way of working and the daily use of virtual ways of staying connected with colleagues and customers, new needs have arisen. In this sense, during the last few months we have been working on the development of applications in Microsoft Teams. The objective is to connect applications and business processes without leaving the tool where the work is actually carried out. In this line, it is possible from Teams:
- Add applications from the tool's app store.
- Develop custom applications, workflows and chatbots to meet specific business needs.
New applications for Teams meetings
One of the main new features in recent weeks is the ability to customize Teams by adding applications to meetings. Until now they could be incorporated into chats and channels. Nearly 20 new apps have been released for Teams meetings and developers will be able to create their own custom apps.
The apps streamline tasks, streamline cooperation, and improve productivity and performance. For example, with ServiceNow's new Now Virtual Agent app, employees will be empowered through improved self-service and faster case resolution. They will be able to submit support requests, view approvals of open requests, respond to notifications, chat with virtual agents for automated support, and streamline agent-employee communication.
Development and integration of custom applications in Teams
As every company has particular processes and ways of working, application development in Microsoft Teams allows custom tools to be added and used within the platform. This can be done through professional development tools such as Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.
However, due to time constraints in some companies, the capabilities of Power Platform and Teams have also been combined. In this way, apps, workflows and chatbots can be developed with low code to be implemented and managed in the collaboration tool without leaving Teams . In this regard, they are already available:
- Power Apps for Teams that allows the development and management of applications in Teams.
- Power Automate for Teams to design simplified workflows with various templates for everyday use.
- And Power Virtual Agents for Teams to easily develop and deploy bots.
In addition, adding Microsoft Dataverse for Teams capabilities can improve application lifecycle management and provide greater control over the data developers use.