Microsoft Teams community call-March 2019

Key Takeaways

morning everyone and thank you so much for joining us this month for our teams developer community call so let me get into the agenda for today so I'll quickly do an introduction for myself talk about some of the new features that have come out in the last 30 days as part of our developer platform and we're going to dive into a specific topic around line of business app development and publishing and management so this is all about how within your organization you can actually manage permissions over who can use apps and who can develop apps and we've got some great new ways for IT organizations to actually go and use our admin Center to go and manage policy and we'll dig into that a little bit and then we'll wrap up with QA so just a little bit about myself as Andrew introduced me my name is Larry Jin I'm a PM on the team's platform and I've actually worked in this area for teams for about three years and change now so it actually had the the sort of honor and privilege of working on the product over the last few years and actually seeing it grow from the very beginning so it's been very exciting to see how far we've come and along the way you know all the folks that have joined and participated in our developer community such as yourself so it's been very very exciting to see that growth and momentum so start off with a little bit of a recap of what's new for developers and some of the cool things that we've brought to production and dev preview over the last 30 days or so the first two are new extensibility features that allow you to bring even more richness to conversations by taking advantage of some of the investments that you've already made in messaging extensions so for those that are familiar with message extensions these will feel very similar the first is message actions which is the ability to actually register custom actions on messages and I'll show you a quick demo and and the pointer to the documentation on that in just a minute the second which is related is this concept of smart link unfurling which is the idea that when a user paste a URL if that URL points to a domain that you register as part of your app your service can actually turn a rich preview for it so much in the same way that a user can search for something using the message extension and return a card and and send that in a message you'll now be able to do that can automatically through this concept of smart link and furling and again I'll show you a quick demo of that as well we've brought instead of api's for programmatically managing shifts so this is very important for our first line worker scenarios as some of the folks on the call may be aware if you've been following some recent developments in Microsoft teams we've made a big push in the retail and first-time worker space so with these larger organizations that have shift based workers we've created a dedicated app experience within teams on web desktop and mobile for managers to go create shifts and for a line workers to actually go and consume those shifts and update them from their mobile devices and now in the graph we have beta api's for you to actually go programmatically manage that a couple of things that have gone general availability the first I'm very excited about is the ability to deploy your SharePoint framework solution as a team's app I believe this is something that we've covered in the past we have a blog post that went out covering this so I encourage folks to check that out basically the idea is that if you built solutions using the SharePoint framework if you've built a web part if you've been using that for your internal organization or your intranet you can now actually package and deploy that into teams as its own line of business app the last one is us app set of policy so I'll talk a little bit more about this in depth later but really with policies you now have a lot more options and the ability to go and manage not only which users can use which apps in your organization but with set of policies you can actually pre configure certain apps to show up on the app bar and then lastly we have a number of other new graph features that have come to both beta and v1 and I'll touch upon that in a minute as well so first off new features as I mentioned message actions and Lincoln furling so you can see they're in a couple of these screenshots with message actions this is really taking advantage of that same message extension protocol and the service that you've already built and you can now attach that to individual messages so the idea is that if an end user adds your app all of their messages will now have this custom action provided you can see here on the right we have a couple examples these are just internal ones that we've created one for replying anonymously and the other for a set reminder these are two example apps that we've built internally just to kind of test the scenario end to end but it's very cool what you can now achieve using these message actions you can imagine taking a conversation or a message and creating a task out of it creating a bug out of it maybe sending it to your CRM system and your ticketing system so there's a lot of really cool opportunities and scenarios that you can fulfill using this similarly with smart link unfurling as you can see below the idea is that when a user pastes one of these URLs if that domain is associated with an app that can unfurl it so to speak will basically make a call out to your service and your service will have an opportunity to respond and return one of the rich these rich cards in this example here we pasted a visual studio team services and now called Azure DevOps URL and on the backend that message extension for Azure DevOps automatically converted that URL into one of these rich cards which is then shown in preview form in the compose box so when the user sends that message they'll be able to go and send that car so actually why don't I jump over and give you guys a really quick demo of what that actually looks like in the product let's go back in the team's here so just hop into our social channel here it's actually our internal environment but that's where we've got some of these bits now message actions in SmartLink unfurling are both available in our developer preview environment so if you've enabled dev preview and you check out our documentation you can actually start building this now so sort of the message actions you'll notice here that we now have these controls sitting on top of the message one for reactions so you can add emotional reactions to messages but you can also add one of these message actions so if I click on more actions you'll see that I've got a couple of these options here the same ones I showed in the screenshot one for a reply anonymously and the other for set reminder so click set reminder and that might take a few seconds for it to spin up but we'll let that go so it's happening inside of this experience is that it's actually running a task module for those that are familiar with the task module it's basically enabling embedding either an adaptive card or a webview inside of this experience and so the idea that there would be a form that pop-ups pops up here so maybe give it a couple more seconds and see if that works this is probably using a free version of free tier of azure so it might be taking a few seconds to spin up alright let's try a different one try this reply anonymously if that doesn't mean better here we go so you can see here that this this test app for replying and honestly it popped up one of these task modules and inside of this task module we've got a basic form that's backed by an adaptive card and I can type in text message here and I can click Submit so the cool click Submit now on the back end all of this is basically sending messages back and forth to your service your message extension service and then your service can handle and process that event however you want so you know if you have a bot that bottom go send a message one-on-one to a user if it has a tab it can go and reflect that behavior in the tab so really up to you how you want to go chain this message action with some of the existing app capabilities that we have in the platform the other thing that I'll show really quickly is the smart link unfurling so we go grab this URL really quickly you'll see here that this is our asher devops instance so this is pointing to a work item so a very common scenario is that people will be you know using teams and they'll also be using the browser and in the browser they might have other tools open let's say for instance that they're using Azure DevOps for project management and you know they're gonna be wanting to converse about these URLs and collaborate around them so in this case let's assume that I paste I'll copy this URL from the browser click paste in here and after a second or so you'll see here that this showed up now in this case I haven't configured Azure DevOps yet so it actually doesn't know what project I'm using if I click setup that should take me into the flow now this flow is actually exactly what would happen if you try to use the azure DevOps message extension from the ribbon down below so I'll just go ahead and I will select my addition and then choose the project and now in a moment here what should happen is yep there you go it automatically converted that URL into a card and you can hit Send now it's great about this is that again it's using the same protocol it's using the same stack as a message extension but for an end user that's not used to to invoking the message extension from this interface it's very intuitive for them to just copy and paste URLs but still get that value through the message extension these features like I mentioned are available in developer preview and you can find them in the documentation so you hop over to the browser here we've made a couple of updates to our documentation under the message extension node the first one under this initiate actions with message extensions node we have now a new section that calls out how you can attach your actions to individual messages and you can see here that we have some examples where in the screenshot we have a dynamics app one note actually sure what that is and then we have an asana app this is this is just kind of a fictional screenshot but you can imagine the kinds of scenarios that you can achieve through message actions similarly with link unfurling we've added a new section here where you can declare support for this new handler so notice that in the manifest under the compose extensions declaration we've added a new section under message handlers where you can specify the different domains that your app supports to automatically unfurl so really interested to see what you guys create as you get start playing around with this stuff I mentioned earlier that we've got some really really cool graph API updates so these are some of the big ones that are worth calling out where you now have application permission for app crud so a common scenario for teams around automating life cycles is that they'd like to programmatically install apps into teams and they'd like to be able to read back the set of apps and really use their own proprietary workflows and business logic to go and manage the apps that are installed to teams as well as to perform other tasks like pinning tabs and removing tabs and so now we provide application permission support in addition to user delegated support this one is a bit of a high note we've enhanced the messaging API so now you can actually reply to messages and channels previously you were only able to create a new reply chain in teams but now you're actually able to reply to that message it we've made some necessary improvements to the formatting as well so that you could include things like subject lines and app mentions so now when you create the automation using them api's in the graph you'll be able to fulfill a lot more richer scenarios than what you could before and then lastly as I mentioned earlier we now have these new shifts ap is in beta so if you're building solutions for retail over first line workers you can now programmatically manipulate the shifts that show up in the team's product so get it into the meat of today's topic new ways to manage apps really excited to talk about some of the new policy innovations but first I'll start with just kind of recapping the different types of apps that we typically see being used by customers and being developed by organizations so of course we have first party apps that are developed by Microsoft and these are typically office 365 workloads like planner Word PowerPoint Excel SharePoint so on and so forth and of course these are fully compliant they're pre-installed in the team's experience we also have these third-party apps that are published by external ISPs many of whom we've partnered with over the last couple of years to go build these solutions and publish them into the office store to show up in teams they represent a lot of popular productivity applications as well as apps for things like developers for marketing sales we have various social apps polling and you know these apps are going to present different concerns from an IT admin standpoint and lastly we of course have the custom apps otherwise known as the line of business apps so of course these are our custom ones that are built by our organization and deployed centrally through the team's admin experience and really they're customized for your business's needs and so over the next few weeks and months you're gonna see us roll out really great new ways for admins to go and manage these both in terms of which apps users can use as well as who can build them so let's start by recapping some of these really really key needs for IT admins right as I as I mentioned or alluded to earlier the major one that comes up quite a bit with our customers is you know how do they go and allow or block specific apps for individual users that's something that comes up time and time again the second which is a related task is how do you control which users go build these custom applications and publish them into the organization a task commonly known as side loading the third one which we don't have a really a way to do a great way to do this today is if an IT organization wants to go and publish and kind of promote these apps how do they go do that so that's encapsulated in three and four we have an ability for an IT admin to go and submit it to the line of business catalog but there isn't really a great way to make them really prominent and discoverable now one and two these are available today but only at the tenant level so if you go to the office 365 admin Center we have the teams blade where you can go and manage these things but they're very very coarse grained and you can't assign those policies on a user level I mentioned as I mentioned you can already publish apps into the line of business catalog but we're missing this a way to make those apps those custom apps that you built more prominent and more discoverable in the end-user experience and so this is just recaps the the legacy office 365 admin experience for managing teams apps today you can manage the first party apps built by Microsoft you can go and manage enable/disable company apps third-party external apps and you can enable or disable side loading but again all of these are tenant level actions they're not something that you can go and manage on a per user basis and so this adds a-- ends up adding quite a bit of friction for our customers who wants to be able to you know gradually roll out a particular app or only allow specific users within the organization to build inside load and so now as we transition into the Microsoft team's admin Center we'll now have a host of new capabilities for admins to go and manage these things the first is the concept of app set of policies so this is a way for you to make apps much more prominent and to customize the end-user experience that they get when they launch teams effectively what this means is the app bar that the end user gets as an IT admin you'll actually be able to pick and choose what features what apps show up on that experience and which ones are there by default and the order in which they appear and and that'll show you in a minute here the second is the concept of a permission policies so today you can go and manage apps allow and block them at a tenant wide level but going forward you'll be able to do this for individual users you'll also be able to specify the concept of an or wipe setting which is really kind of a tenant level override so if there are specific apps that you absolutely want to turnoff for your organization you'll be able to do that but of course you'll also be able to assign policy for specific users now the team's product takes care of enforcing all of this so that if you block a specific app all the interactions will be disabled and that app is not going to show up in the product for the end-user lastly we have more granular side loading policies and so a couple things I'll call out here one is of course that you'll be able to manage this on a per user basis so let's say that you only have a hundred users in your organization that you want to be have the right or the permission to go and upload custom apps you'll be able to grant that but secondly I think just as important is that we've separated the side loading and permission policies so that if you want to go and manage which apps show third-party apps are allowed or blocked from the third-party from the team's app store and you want to manage that completely separately from who can side load those two settings are now decoupled historically those two settings were actually sort of intermingled so that you couldn't actually granularly manage which third-party apps are on or off without also enabling side loading for the organization or turning off side loading rather so pop in a quick demo of what this actually looks like go back into my browser here so we'll start off with the admin center so for those that are familiar with this experience I'm logged into here and you know I can manage all the permit of the policies across my organization and then I can assign policies for specific users but I'll call your attention to this new section here under teams apps and we've got a couple of new policies that we've created and these will be the ones that I just mentioned the first is permission and second is set up and so the experience here is pretty straightforward we have here a list of all the policies that have been created so this happens to be a test tenant where we're managing all these different policies I'll go down here to the org-wide default so this is the one that kind of comes in the box everyone gets it by default and so by default all the third-party apps are allowed all the tenant apps are allowed these are all the custom line of business apps that you've built and there are no specific blocked apps now in this case we've gone and we've added Wonder list as one of the apps that we want to block as part of this policy and if I want to I can go add more apps to this so for instance if I you know really don't want any users using let's say the Jenkins developer tool I was searching in the wrong list actually so these are all the Microsoft apps only so actually if I search something like SharePoint's that should show up there you go so I can add SharePoint to the list of blocked apps here and so that'll prevent users from using this app so I click Save that'll go and make the update hopefully this doesn't blow up our test tenant but you never know there so that was successfully updated and now if I actually want to go and apply that policy to a user I go here to the list of users and I'll select a random user here Adel Vance and I can update the assign policy now in this case she already has the global or Galicia sign but if I want to I can go and update that to something else so I can choose the policy for her this one sounds very scary block everything I can assign that policy now a lot of our customers what they'll do typically is that they will create and craft the policies within the team's UI here but then to actually assign them to individual users they'll typically use something like powershell commandlets because that that tends to scale much better for larger organizations where you have to go and assign policy over a large number in the list the second policy that I'll show you is setup policy I'll go down to one that we've already created this developer policy so again this policy is going to govern which apps show up by default out of the box for end-users in the app bar and so see here that we have a number of these third-party apps that we've added in addition to the standard ones that you get like activity shifts teams in chat but we've also added third-party apps like bitbucket and karma smartsheet Trello and mural as well as github and of course I can add additional apps to this if I want to by searching for specific ones so if I want to add let's say JIRA I can go ahead and add that to this policy now again if I want to assign this to an individual user I'd go back to the users list pick the users that I want and then assign this specific policy today now you might be wondering what that actually looks like in the product so I'll head back into this team's environment this is logged into as one of the users in that tenon that you just saw on the left here you'll notice something very different and very new is that rather than having that plain vanilla team's experience where you get just at activity and chat and teams and files you now have all of these additional apps that have shown up here and this is incredibly powerful because now as an administrator of the organization you have way more flexibility in terms of how you want that end-user experience to manifest so let me back in here we'll talk a little bit about some of those common scenarios for using pinning let's say that you've built a line of business app like help desk or talent management and you want to ensure that the users in your organization are actually using it and they're finding it easily within the product then app set a policy is a great way to ensure that because you can pin it directly on the app bar secondly you might have specific apps that you want to assign by job function so if you have the sales department and you've built a custom sales dashboard again you can use app settle policy to ensure that those users have it more prominently there in their experience you can use it to roll out or gradually roll out new apps and so if there is a third-party app that you're interested in for your organization they don't want to open it up to every single user again you can use this as a way to drive an encourage discovery but only among that specific set of users and then lastly many of our customers actually use this capability to streamline the team's claim so many of our retail customers in particular will want to go deliver a s'more simplified version of team's experience where it only has things like activity chat and shift management and with app set a policy your app now able to control that and of course we make sure that this experience is consistent across the web desktop and mobile clients so in fact if you were to set this policy here as an end user on the iOS and Android clients you'd actually see a consistent experience where you get these five apps above the fold on the mobile client and then the rest of these would fall into the overflow so this is the overflow on web desktop and we have a similar entry point on or mobile clients for that overflow now of course a very big use case is how you stitch this together with with side loaded apps so for instance here we have in this canto so tenant this one measly side loaded a custom built line of business app the file bot but if you wanted to you know you could use app set of policy to actually pre pin that so for instance if I wanted to make that more prominent go here and I can search for file bot so you notice that file bot shows up here as one of the possible apps that I can go and pin as part of this policy which would then make that show up by default on the app bar for this user that has a policy assigned so for this particular topic for some of the policies that we just talked about we've updated our documentation and we have that available online at this lake and then of course we have our typical developer community link here so really encourage everyone on the call to take a look at the new stuff that has come out in the last 30 days in particular message actions smart link unfurling some of the new graphic capabilities that we've talked about but most definitely encourage everyone to take a look at the new policies that are coming your way especially for those that are administrators within their organizations this is going to be very important in terms of your overall rollout an adoption strategy so coming up next month we have a really cool topic we'll go back into kind of the usual more dev oriented conversation but it's going to be around best practices for how you build an effective app that combines BOTS message extensions actions in both one-on-one and group context so this is a topic that's actually very near and dear to me having worked on BOTS and message extensions for the last few years we really want to help developers have a good strategy for how they incorporate all of these features into their app experience to build something that's cohesive and delightful for their end users so I think with that I'll pause and hand it over for QA Andrew if there's anything else that you want me to bring up I'm definitely happy to do so thanks Larry if anybody has any questions feel free to add them in chat or or call out if you are gonna unmute yourself and call out please do remember to mute yourself again after you finished asking me asking your question looks like we have a question coming in through chat is the team's admin available now so I'm assuming that you're a specified you're talking about those specific policies so app setup policy that's actually going to be rolling out over the next coming days to to our general audience we've already been quite successful in bringing that to our tab audience and so a number of our of our customer tenants have already started using the app set of policy that you just saw but that's going to be coming to production in a very very shortly and then the other two policies around permission and sideloading those are going to be coming in the following weeks so as I mentioned earlier the app set of policy that's going to be rolling out broadly to everyone and then permission policy we're going to be first entering a tap with our a specific set of customers in you know late March early April timeframe and then we expect that in sometime in April we're going to start rolling out the permission policy for for 1/8 of blocking and allowing specific apps that'll be coming to production again sometime in April timeframe so there's no other questions we'll go ahead and start to wrap up and do please join us next week we're really excited about the showing showing you how to how to build immersive conversational interactions combining a bunch of different functions I think I think it's gonna be really useful and and a lot of the stuff that Larry in preview today is going to is gonna is going to be in as part of that talk as well well the PowerShell commands be available at the same time as the as the app set policy yes yeah so we'll have commandlets for for assigning those policies those new policies that I mentioned in the same way that we have a policy assignment for all the existing ones so yes those will be available when we roll those out I believe the app set up one is is we already have the the command let's I don't think we've published them yet so that will be coming very soon