(exciting music)
- Hey everyone, Teams as a product,
since its inception, has played a pivotal role as a
communication and collaboration platform.
The spread of this pandemic has further
the increase its importance as large sections of the
workforce and not just information workers,
are forced to work from home.
Efficient collaboration through
mobile devices continues to be a critical component of how
we work today.
While some use mobile as a companion device,
for some working from the mobile device
has become paramount,
especially in those geographies and for those workers
that don't have an easy access to large screen devices like
laptops and desktop computers.
I'm Anuij Bahl.
And to David, my colleague,
we will talk about some new, exciting,
and upcoming capabilities on Teams mobile platform that
enables mobile first and to empower
organizations to be more productive.
Today around 50% of Teams
users use mobile as the primary device
or as a companion device
in addition to the desktop plan.
With Teams mobile client and Teams
mobile extensibility platform,
has seen a drastic growth, with growth averaging
over a hundred percent month on month growth
in the last six months,
mobile has become popular.
And in some cases,
the preferred client of usage for apps ranging from those
created by Microsoft, third party developers,
to line of business customer, catered
for specific use cases within an organization.
To address this accelerated growth on Teams Mobile
our focus has been on mobile first
and mobile optimized scenarios.
Today we will focus on three key feature sets
that empower mobile first development.
These are personal apps,
native device capabilities and developer tools.
Personal apps has been a popular
and widely used construct on desktop.
And we're happy to now support them on mobile as well.
I would like to now hand over to Vikramjiit
who will talk more about how some
of our customers and partners
are reaping the benefits of
of personal apps within Teams Mobile.
- Thanks Anuj, hi everyone. Let's dive in.
Personal apps are Teams applications
with the person's goal,
that focus on interactions with a single user.
As you can see in the screenshots below,
these are the apps that are available in the bottom bar for
for mobile clients.
On desktop, personal apps reside
in the left frame.
Personal apps ensure that users have a single
surface in which they complete all workplace
interactions and collaboration efforts.
These apps can host one or both of tabs and both.
So you can leverage these for both UI
as well as conversations-based action.
Lastly, personal apps
on Teams reduce the need for users to install multiple
native apps on their devices,
which would have required both additional storage as well as
the DW sources.
The fact that these personal apps can be pre-installed and
pinned by the admin on their employees Teams clients makes
discovery and adoption extremely seamless.
Personal apps for mobile clients
went live earlier in May this year,
and we've seen a major uptick since in their adoption.
A lot of our partners have either tweaked
their existing desktop
apps or built new ones from scratch to support the users on
the smaller mobile form factor.
Today we want to talk about two such partners,
Yammer and QBO,
who've invested in building high quality experiences
for the mobile users.
Both partners found merit in investing efforts
to deploy personal app.
So as to tap onto the rapidly increasing user base of
Teams mobile clients.
Let's dive into Yammer first.
For those who don't know,
Yammer is a social networking website
for Enterprises by Microsoft.
The Yammer personal app allows users
to complete core actions
from within the Teams client.
It also enables users to move discussions between Teams
chats and Yammer posts,
depending on the scale of the required audience.
Let's see a quick demo for the app.
we start this demo with Allan's message to Anuj
informing him about a recent success at work,
Anuj loves this development,
and he really appreciates the efforts
that the team has put in this.
He wants a larger group to recognize the success,
so he decides to make a post on Yammer about this.
He opens the Communities
personal app in his Microsoft Teams client.
Communities is a Yammer app for Teams.
Yammer authenticates Anuj's credentials.
So he can access all
the core features right from within Teams.
He finds the most appropriate community,
creates a praise post,
by tagging Grady and Megan and writing out a message
that all the people in the group can see
along with the tags
Well done, indeed.
Now, as you pointed out earlier,
Yammer authenticates Anuj's credentials so he can explore
all this core content like he would have
on a dedicated Yammer client.
As he scrolls through his feed items, Anuj finds
a particular one interesting,
which he believes merits discussion with a smaller group of
individuals before a reply can be made to.
He copies the link to the post, goes
back to the start screen, and opens the
relevant group chat.
He brings the post to everyone's notice
and starts a discussion.
So an appropriate reply can be made about
the group's current thinking on the topic,
to Rajesh's Yammer thread.
Anuj achieves all of these scenarios
that are powered by Yammer without
having to leave the comfort and familiarity of Microsoft
Teams client, an important reason for Yammer,
to invest in Teams mobile. Also to target users who don't
have access to desktop clients.
For our many first line workers.
Such as teachers, nurses, and industrial employees,
Teams mobile is a single hub for all job-related needs.
As these workers are the backbone of any business.
It was important for Yammer to build an expedient that
brings in these workers into the pole of the social network.
Another example of a great mobile experience for Teams
personal apps is QBO built by a partner Unscramble.
The QBO personal app is a bot that allows it users
to create a linked data source of facts and insights.
The app then displays these insights
in the form of charts, tables,
which can also be shared and collaborated with other users.
Let's see a demo of the app now.
(exciting music)
Democratizing data access has been
a key mission for QBO
and the mobile personal app enabled anytime access
to their solution of their users.
There are certain guidelines that we expect all apps to
follow as they make the content accessible from Teams
mobile clients, all apps distributed via
the app source are validated for
these guidelines before being approved
to be available on mobile.
There is no approval required for customer's app who are
distributed by an organization's admin center,
but following these guidelines and chose
a good experience for
your mobile users, regardless of mode of distribution.
The most important requirement obviously is that the UI
content of your personal app should be responsive to suit
the mobile form factor.
A public developer docs provide a detailed guide on the
recommended layout, color palettes,
and typography that we recommend to be used
on Teams mobile apps.
We would advise you to refer to these,
before you start deploying the first personal app on mobile.
You can validate and debug your personal apps experiences by
connecting your mobile devices
via Chrome dev tools to your desktop.
This is currently only available for Android devices,
but it's extremely beneficial for understanding the
protocols and front end behavior.
That's all we have on personal apps for today.
I will now hand over to Anuj
to talk more about the mobile first
capabilities we are exposing to developers via STK.
- The pandemic has fueled the growth
of Teams beyond North America and Europe
markets, FLW and university students, frontline workers,
and other group of workers that don't have access to large
screen devices use mobile on an everyday basis for work.
The growth in usage in Latin America
and the Indian subcontinent has led
to a boom in mobile only users.
So this growth has been exponential to the tune of 20 X in
the last six months,
and we expect this growth to continue in the near future.
Hence it became paramount for us to focus on helping and
empowering Teams developers to build great mobile first app
by enabling mobile device capabilities in the GSSP.
Here is a list of device capabilities that we are enabling
by end of 2020.
We aim to unlock some of the critical scenarios that need
access to device capabilities and have an increased
relevance for the mobile only workforce.
Carefully selecting and viewing images
using GPS enabled phones
to pick up location,
using microphone for audio recordings and messages,
scanning QR code to perform a
specific task, are some of the device
capabilities we have worked on.
This example shows a services company Contoso that
specializes in car and truck repair.
Customers can call Contoso helpline for either to deal with
maintenance or in the case of an accident.
When Contoso receives a call from it's customers,
it sends out a field agent and to the customer's doorstep.
The field agent is typically a junior mechanic and does
initial investigation of the vehicle and is responsible for
recording the place of accident,
customer's address, condition of the car in detail,
and other information that will help give context
to the mechanics in the workshop.
Contoso has been using Teams for collaboration and
communication within it's phone.
They have created a channel where they track all new
customer requests.
Earlier Contoso field agents used standalone application
to record information on customer visits,
and then used to pull that information
manually to Teams.
This resulted in delays
and loss of information and time,
but the help of a number of device capabilities now enabled
on Teams platform, Contoso has enabled
a tab app that lets field agents
record information easily on Teams
that is instantly viewable on the Contoso repair site.
A field agent can quickly create a new inspection item
to create a repair ticket.
The field agent can use the attach picture option
to capture images
of the car using office lens.
They also have the option of choosing these images straight
from the gallery.
PF enabled multiple image support
that lets users select and upload
multiple images at the same time and can also be previewed
using the image view.
The agent, it also has the option to drop a pin
to the location of the customer's address.
The agent instead of typing out a message has the option to
record an audio of the description
on the condition of the car.
He can then submit this ticket and information finally,
on the ticket.
And it's submitted back to the tab app in the channels.
These device capabilities also work in power apps.
Power apps, as many of you know, is Microsoft low code,
no code tool for building straight app.
They're working closely with the power platform team
to make products work seamlessly inside Microsoft Teams.
This demo is an actual template,
which our customers will soon be able to use for that staff
check ins scenarios,
existing controls like add picture control,
geolocation, and microphone, will now work
in Power Apps within teams.
As you can see in the demo, the user
is able to add a picture and can check in at work
along with this location.
We have exposed the following API's that can be leveraged by
developers to integrate these device capabilities
in their apps.
Select media API can be used across file formats,
like audio, and image to select media.
View images in API,
how to preview images and testimonials and get media
can be used to transfer large files, seamlessly.
For location, we have exposed,
get location and show location API to capture and show
custom locations on the map.
I would now like to hand over Vikramjiit
who will talk about our investments and upcoming features in
the enhancing developer capabilities and tools.
- We've been talking to our partners,
customers, and developers, who create these amazing
experiences on a platform.
And you've received feedback on the top end point,
the development process.
Today we want to talk more about two new capabilities
which is releasing soon which
are directly aimed at making the
development more seamless for Teams Mobile platform.
Both these capabilities will be available for developers by
the end of this year.
The first is the ability to run your Teams app directly from
VS code, onto a connected Teams mobile client.
Up until now validating
your apps experiences on mobile required side loading
and waiting for it to sync to your mobile device,
which makes the process full of friction.
However, you would soon be able to run
the code directly onto your device
as you undertake the development on VS code.
This will be available soon for both Android and iOS.
And is already supported for desktop,
this will ensure you can test and even compare your apps
behavior on all platforms,
at the same time,
greatly improving our ability
to find bugs and behavior gaps.
Another highly requested feature has been the ability for a
developer to specify the platforms on which their
app is supported.
With this capability
developers would be able to specify if their app
should be made available on one or both
of Teams Mobile and desktop clients.
This will release developers from vesting in optimizations
for local use cases as well
as blocking undesirable functionality,
which may arise to unrestricted availability
of the app on all platforms.
And that's all what we had for today.
Thank you for being such an amazing audience.
We hope you've learned enough in this session to set you up
for success on a journey for building apps on
Teams Mobile platform.
Here are some links we believe will be very
helpful for you in this journey.
Thank you again for joining in and have a good day.