Microsoft Teams Getting Templates Support, New Automations

Microsoft Teams has been in the spotlight lately thanks to the increased demand caused by a lot of people working from home. Teams has been getting a lot of new features recently, and at Build 2020, Microsoft announced some major new updates for the service.

Teams will soon get support for templates. The idea for templates is to make the process of setting up a new team much quicker — you can choose from a number of existing templates based on common team types, or create your own ones. When you are creating a new team, you can simply use one of those templates to kick things off much faster than before. Templates in Teams are expected to launch in the “next few months”.

For developers, Microsoft is making it easier to develop Teams apps. The company is introducing new Teams extensions for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code that will help developers making apps for Teams. Developers will even be able to publish apps directly from the IDE to AppSource or their company’s app catalog.

Another major Teams announcement coming out of Build 2020 is the new integration for Microsoft’s Power platform. Users will now be able to build apps using Power Apps, and in July, users will be able to use Power Automate to automate different experiences within Teams, including automated @mentioining. Bots made with Microsoft’s Power virtual Agents tool will allow users to add bots to Teams with a single click. Single sing-on support for Power Virtual Agents bots will also be added later in July.

Microsoft’s previously announced Bookings apps in Teams is now generally available as well, the company revealed at Build 2020. It is also announcing new Microsoft Graph APIs for Shifts in Microsoft Teams.