All Things Microsoft Cloud: Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams

Key Takeaways

hello everyone welcome back to our video series all things microsoft cloud i have my colleagues with me dan and bob my name is achabash and we are so excited to be here today we will talk about all things about teams apps so let's get started yeah so we're as mentioned really excited to have bob german with us so let's kick things off bob tell us about yourself first off oh great so thanks it's great to be here and hi everyone so yeah i've actually been working in um developing for microsoft collaboration tools for a long time i used to be building protocol stacks for networks and then somehow got into sharepoint development which was really exciting i love helping people collaborate better and work better together through the things that i build and so i was fortunate to kind of get in on the ground floor of teams app development yes this is exciting but for the ones who maybe never worked with microsoft teams apps before what is microsoft teams apps well it's a great question because a lot of people think it's the app that you download in order to run microsoft teams right but actually microsoft teams is really kind of the first cloud-based collaboration tools fully cloud-based so all of the back-end services that are part of microsoft 365 they're all there so you can actually add your app to that as well so perhaps you've clicked on a document inside of a teams chat and had microsoft word open up that's a teams app it's a it's still microsoft word but it's running inside of teams so developers have this great opportunity to add their apps to the team's user experience as well this is very cool and it's nice to know that people can build custom apps for microsoft teams to increase their collaboration because teams is a tool we use day-to-day these days right for work well there's such a huge opportunity there with the reach of microsoft there's i think it's up to 270 million users so it's it's insane how many users and yeah it can really it can really change the way that people work so from a microsoft cloud standpoint walk us through if i'm a developer what would i use from the overall microsoft cloud that relates to building teams apps well that's the cool thing about the architecture teams actually you could write the apps anywhere on the internet so a lot of people build teams apps in microsoft azure and host them in microsoft azure a lot of people use power platform and it really doesn't matter because i mean it's a little bit easier i would say that to use one of those than a completely different non-microsoft cloud but from a team's perspective your app has to be reachable on the internet and teams is going to cleverly stitch it into the ui regardless of where it runs another thing that's kind of interesting about azure is that there is this thing called azure communication services which i know you both know about because i've seen you present on it and what that allows you to do is actually bring teams into your app so it sort of flips it around so that you can make teams calls and chats and things appear inside of your app or you could build an app that sort of works for some teams users at the same time as some consumers or non-teams users and brings them together so it's super flexible what you can do wow this is awesome so i guess you can build bolts by using either power virtual agents or azure bot service you can also build tabs by using many other cloud solutions available in microsoft cloud do you have some inspiring scenarios for us so that developer developers can get to learn more about what they can do with teams yeah i think that the key is really that um switching apps is not such a big deal for us we're all pretty good at alt tab or whatever your operating system is to switch from one app to another um the the pain point i think is around the context so if you're telling me about a customer and then i have to go look up the customer in some crm system then i'm doing extra work just to kind of connect the dots but if we're collaborating and i can get a message that brings me right into an app and not only am i not switching out of teams but i'm also not having to look up information that really streamlines and reduces the possibility of errors in in a great way there are these also things called messaging extensions where you can insert business data directly into the team's conversation and then take action with these things called adaptive cards so there's so many great ways to just take yina was talking about the systems of record and the systems of engagement with teams apps it's just you and you're getting your work done with your team that's it there's no there doesn't have to be this distinction going back and forth well how many times maybe it's just me folks but how many times have you gone to another system did whatever you needed and then completely forgot what you were doing in the first place yeah exactly right a lot of times i'll get uh distracted or i'll be going back to tell the person i did something in the in the system of record and then i see an important message from someone else and off i go right there it really can streamline the way that people work every day well this is great info where as a developer what are some resources locations what would you recommend when it comes to learning more about building teams yeah there's really a few different tracks i think if you're starting from scratch you probably want to start and we'll put some links on the screen you will probably want to start with power platform or with the teams toolkit so for pro devs teams toolkit will pull everything together and get you started quickly for power app power platform devs of course there's a ton of solutions there um and then if you're interested in kind of extending an app or that's already there maybe using whatever tool set um or maybe you just really want to learn how it all works under the covers we're actually introducing something called app camp which is a hands-on experience where you are given a simple application and then over the course of some labs hands-on you port it and make it into a full-featured teams app so i'm really excited about that i've been working on that with my team and particularly with robio williams uh who is unfortunately not on the set today but um anyway i would encourage people to check that out excellent excellent well thanks for joining us aicha thanks for being here again for this video series and we'd encourage you to check out the other videos that we have in this all things microsoft cloud series thanks a lot