Teams App Dev Challenge winners show off Node.js and React app

Key Takeaways

hello and welcome to another episode of microsoft 365 show and tell here on the microsoft 365 developer channel my name is bob german and i'm very excited and honored today to introduce a wonderful isv partner my serious game whose ed mill application won the award for best education app in the team's app development challenge earlier this year in this video you'll get to meet the people who created the app and see it in action and we'll discuss their experiences and lessons learned in the process so to start let me introduce my serious game product manager sophie managu hi sophie hello bob nice to see nice to see you here today yeah you too and i see you've brought some of your teammates absolutely i did uh so working with me on the edmu product for more than two years now uh we have our two developers uh the back-end developer yes so hi i'm holly wilcoy so i'm a web developer on mostly backend yes for myself gaming yeah and i am gabrielle uh developer for headmill 2 and mostly frontend oh that's great great to meet you both thanks so much so um sophie um could you tell us just a little bit about your company and the application sure so my serious game is a french company a french-based company who's been working on uh creating uh our online solution to train uh learners inside companies so we are a b2b company historically and a few years back our clients came to us to say okay you're one of the best actors in france to create online training solution uh how about you give us the possibility to create some training ourselves and this is where edmule was originated so to give some users the possibility to create very high quality uh online training content in a very short time so it's a good complement to what massaer's game can otherwise offer well that's really cool um can you perhaps give us a peek at the app i'd love to see how it works i'm not sure bob are you sure um i think so yeah i'm sure [Laughter] yeah my pleasure of course why would i not want to see this app yeah we are very proud to share it with you today um so the app was built on three big functions um so the first function is the function to create online training content the other big function is uh allows you as a user to share your content share it with the user and the third big part is uh based on the follow-up follow-up with statistics with very detailed results so you can see you have an all-in-one tool to create share and follow up on your online training content uh by the way edmule the name ed mill comes from ed as education and neil it's like the meal of uh the transformation you know a meal like transform raw material into very high id value material and here the raw material that we start with is uh the creator's knowledge and what we end up with is with a very high value is uh the uh online training content our uh our goal is to allow almost anyone to create uh some high quality uh training content not only like you are a specialist of online training content creation but also if you're a specialist of your field like you're a salesperson you're an accountant um you're an i.t person and you want to share or you are asked to share your uh your no knowledge your know-how with your colleagues with your peers well you can come to edneal and we're going to take you step by step to create some very high quality content in a very short time um so here when you start creating you can select show me the way which will uh take you the long way and ask you a lot of questions to make sure that you know where you're going to and where you want to take your learners to so you can see these are very classic concepts when it comes to pedagogy or andragogy as we say but we make them simpler so that anyone can take them and make relevant decisions when it comes to the content so here your main goal could be to that your learner are able to analyze um what is at stake uh with uh teams app creation just an example on top of my head and then you have you can you have to uh select some uh you know uh goals some pedagogical goals for your learners to reach to reach the main goal that makes sense right and just going quickly then we help you structure your course so we have some good good practices you know because we work with afnor with the certification company that said okay here is what what you have to do what you have to take your users through so that they can create very high level content quality you have the satisfaction survey and you also you can use the code evaluation system uh to just share your learning course with your learners and then automatically 15 30 and 60 days and and even 90 days after they first successfully went through the course they will receive automatically called evaluations so we try to make as you may have understood by now we try to make the creation creators experience as smooth and enjoyable as the learner's experience will be makes sense and this was a software as a service that was already available before you uh brought it into teams correct absolutely absolutely so this is um to give you some perspective and see show you how uh things are done in the background and then we'll see how learners can enjoy this experience in teams so what once as a still as a creator once you have done all this you can go to your library and i'm going to show you like a finished uh course with only with a few activities here all right so you can this is what you can see all right on the administrator side then you have a few steps to complete as i told you at the beginning you have to create learners you have to create a group you put everything together and then you create you you share your content and then your learners what can they do where they can access that meal in a website but also in teams so the good practice but you don't absolutely have to do that you can create like a dedicated space for this a training topic and then you ask your student to add the edmule app here so you can my computer already knows it meal obviously you add it as you know you pin it so you don't lose it afterwards right and you come to your learner space and you have access to uh one or several uh learning courses that your creator your administrator have created and selected for you and then you enter your training program directly in enemy and you go through uh your uh your online training program nice there you are so you can find the activities that we we saw on the administrator's side and you have access to of course the core of the of admin which is the learning content but also everything around so the training programs you can have an overview of everything that you have been doing and that you're going to be learning you have access to your results here you have access to any documents that your administrator may have put for you um attached to your learning course and and your profile so pretty much everything you need as a learner he's available here you can go back in the chat that we saw here and you can ask any questions you have you know to your supervisor your manager or your colleagues that can help you so we really like this peer-to-peer approach and everything is the same too that's great so are your customers more schools or universities or industry where or all of them uh mostly industries uh big companies that have a lot of uh you know training to do with their employees and some um some training companies as well that have their own expertise and they want to share the expertise with clients yeah that's great it makes a lot of sense so how did you get the idea to build this and how have your customers reacted yeah so i got the mic now yeah please gabrielle so we decided to create this this theme app to answer a big problematic for our clients so i remind a client that other part-time commencing learners to run online and the principal reason was the multiplication of passwords and web url so it was replicated for her to explain each learner how to use a mirror so when we launched the teams up she was really impressed by the fact that she can now explain how and it works directly in a team meeting and she saved a lot of time and had amazing engagement weights um so to conclude i would say that now it's simpler faster and more intuitive even for for beginners like for all learners that's cool so so really the single sign-on capability was one of the big one of the big drivers for this of course that's really good um so i know you had an existing application on a technical side um how difficult was it and what process did you follow to make this work in teams so yeah as you saw so we already have a web application that is working for good so but the so this app is laid out two parts so the learner part on the remote trader admin part and we only wanted to to put the learner part between for now at least we quickly learned that it was that the team's app is using the same technology on code as a website so it's pretty much the same thing so it was really easy to to adapt our existing code to put it in teams without rewriting everything so it was a good surprise um yeah easy to easy to do it's great what was your biggest learning what did you what did you take away yeah i guess nothing no i can't no we learned that developing our first team app told us that don is better than perfect and that we need to think scalable and start small like olivia side we wanted at first developing all the the entire app in teams but we start for now we are just the learner side and as i said creating a team app is pretty straightforward and really well documented so good to know how about how long did it take um how long i guess there are kind of two parts uh the first one was developing so maybe one or two months the second part was quite longer because it was um i don't know validation validation yeah right this one was longer that's great so any hints or ideas on what uh what you're going to do next with your uh with your teams at yes of course uh concerning the future so we'd like to to use what's more about what is available in teams because for now uh we pretty much only display what's already available on the web application we would like to add more in direction interaction between the learners on teams like pushing notification or sending adaptive cards with some statistics or using the bots to uh come on to get helps i mean there is a lot of features that we can use their futures so yeah complete that sounds really good i look forward to seeing all of that any final thoughts yeah actually we are this experience gave us the the idea to use microsoft teams uh apps and functionalities for other projects too oh that's really good it's great to hear well i can't wait to see the next thing that that you all come up with thanks so much uh sophie olivier gabrielle i've really learned a lot here and i can see why ed mill took the prize for uh best education app this year so thanks to you and thanks also to everyone watching if you like this video please click the like button and uh please hit the subscribe button as well so that you'll be notified of future videos in the m365 developer channel thanks again thank you very much bye