Microsoft kicked off its Build 2022 developer conference this morning, and this edition will once again be packed with Microsoft 365 updates. Microsoft Teams, one of the fastest-growing apps in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem is getting several new features, and one of the biggest announcements is a new collaboration feature named Live Share.
“We are introducing Live Share, a capability for your apps to go beyond passive screen sharing and enable participants to co-watch, co-edit, co-create and more in Teams meetings. Developers can use new preview extensions to the Teams Client SDK to easily extend existing Teams apps and create Live Share experiences in meetings,” explained Jeff Teper, CVP of Microsoft 365 Collaboration
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Frame.io, Hexagon, Skillsoft, MakeCode, Accenture, Parabol, and Breakthru will be among the first companies to build Live Share experiences in Teams. In the image below, you can see a Live Share prototype experience from Hexagon showing engineers annotating and editing a 3D model in real-time during a Teams meeting.
Microsoft also announced today that all developers can now create Loop components in Microsoft Teams by updating their existing Adaptive Cards or building new Adaptive Card-based Loop components. For those unfamiliar, Loop components are items (table, task list, paragraph, etc.) that everyone in a Microsoft Teams channel can edit inline.
Loop components were announced back at Microsoft’s Ignite conference in November, and they currently work across Microsoft Teams and Outlook, and thanks to Microsoft Editor and its new Context IQ capabilities, users will be able to surface relevant Adaptive Card-based Loop components based on the context in Outlook email or Teams chat.
Microsoft also announced today new Graph API enhancements that will allow developers to embed Teams chats and channel messages into their apps. “We are introducing several new APIs in public preview to with capabilities like enabling chats with federated users (i.e., users outside your tenant), identifying which messages are read and which are unread by the current user, and subscribing to user chats and to membership changes,” Teper explained.
These new Graph API enhancements will be generally available later this summer. The end goal is to allow Teams users to collaborate seamlessly between Teams and their existing apps without having to do any back and forth, and it would certainly be impressive to see Microsoft and its developer partners make it work in a seamless way.