Microsoft Teams is slowly transitioning from a Slack-like office messaging service to its own collaboration platform, as you may have seen. You may install applications within Teams to manage Asana projects, or create a custom app tailored to your company’s needs, in addition to just conversing with your coworkers.
Microsoft will emphasize Teams as a platform for collaborative apps at Build 2021. Microsoft is offering developers additional options after introducing applications for Team Meetings last fall. For starters, because Teams is now testing main stage collaboration, its applications will no longer be constrained to sidebars. Whiteboard apps, for example, might take up the primary window in Teams, allowing you to scrawl ideas down alongside colleagues.
Developers may also create bespoke Meetings scenarios for their businesses, as well as use APIs to automate key meeting events such as the start and conclusion of a session. (Imagine getting a friendly reminder before a meeting to give particular assignments.)
Teams developers will be able to use the media streams during Meetings for things like real-time transcription, translation, and note taking starting this summer. This also provides IT managers more control over how applications utilize those resources – after all, you wouldn’t want a transcription service to be able to transcribe every single meeting.
Microsoft is also showing off Fluid Framework components in Teams Chats. This allows you to create a table, list, or text field that can be copied into other Teams discussions or Office 365 apps and edited in real-time by peers.
It’s difficult to determine if Microsoft’s Teams collaboration initiative will succeed, but the platform is clearly appealing. Teams is used by over 145 million people every day, according to the business, giving it a wide addressable market.
Teams apps may also be used on a variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android, which should appeal to developers. Teams applications are, at the very least, one way for the firm to separate itself from Slack’s very straightforward app integration.
And now that Google is promoting “smart canvas” as a way to make its online Office suite more collaborative, it’s the ideal time for Microsoft to exercise its own muscles.
