Build 2021: Microsoft Teams
- Paul Thurrott
- May 25, 2021
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Microsoft Teams is an extensible platform and so it should come as no surprise that Microsoft is announcing some new developer capabilities at Build 2021.
The biggest of these concerns Microsoft Teams apps for meetings, which was announced last year, giving developers the ability to build on the Teams meeting experience. At Build this week, however, Microsoft is expanding this functionality with:
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Shared stage integration. Currently in preview, this feature provides developers with access to the main stage in a Teams meeting through a simple configuration in their app manifest. “This provides a new surface to enable real-time, multiuser collaboration experiences for their meetings apps, such as whiteboarding, design, project boards, and more,” Microsoft says.
New meeting event APIs. Also in preview, these new APIs enable the automation of meeting-related workflows through events, such as meeting start and end. Support for “many more” events are planned for later this year, Microsoft adds.
Together mode extensibility. Coming soon, this feature lets developers create custom scenes for Teams meetings and share them with users using a simple design experience in the Developer portal (which is also getting some enhancements.)
Media APIs and resource-specific consent. Also coming soon, this provides developers with real-time access to audio and video streams for transcription, translation, note-taking, insights gathering, and more.
Aside from Microsoft Teams apps for meetings, Microsoft is also revealed several other Teams updates. These include:
Preview versions of new features for the Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. “These features make the Teams app development experience easier by reducing the amount of code needed, providing out-of-the-box integrations with Microsoft Azure, tapping into data from the Microsoft Graph and more,” Microsoft says. Some notable new features include Azure Functions integration, a single-line Microsoft Graph client, and streamlined hosting to an integrated development environment (IDE).
Developer portal for Microsoft Teams updates. Formerly called App Studio, the Developer portal for Microsoft Teams is getting enhanced features like web and device access, environment configuration management, peer collaboration via read/write permissions, and links for subscription as a service (SaaS) offerings for new Teams in-app purchases.
Message extensions on the web. Message extensions are now supported in the web version of Teams (and Outlook on the web).
Adaptive card support. Developers can now build an Adaptive Card and deploy it across Microsoft Teams and Outlook using the new universal Action.Execute action model. “Adaptive Cards allow developers to easily share user interface data, so experiences are consistent across multiple apps and services,” Microsoft notes. Previously, developers needed to build two separate Adaptive Cards integrations for Outlook and Teams.
Fluid framework integration. Fluid components are now available in Microsoft Teams chats in private preview, but Microsoft says this capability will expand to more customers in the coming months. These components are web-powered, can be edited in real-time or asynchronously, and work across Teams and other Office apps. In Teams chats, Fluid components let users send a message with a table, action items, or a list that can be co-authored and edited by others. They can also be copied and pasted across Teams chats.