So hello everybody, thank you again for joining us today for our another edition of Team Superheroes.
And if you'll introduce yourself, please my esteemed guest. Thanks, Jace. Hi everybody. My name is Nidhi
Shandilya I'm part of our Team's platform growth
And I'm super excited to talk to you about app templates today. Over to you Jace. Awesome.
So really stoked to talk to you all about this subject, you know
As you can imagine Teams is about two and a half years old at this point
And we've learned a ton over the past couple years.
Particularly when it comes to building custom solutions in Teams. You know we've got a lot of IT professionals,
Developers, citizen developers, come to us and we've seen a lot of patterns over the coming years
But I'm hoping you can maybe share with us
How you got into this app template, and we'll show you the app template in a moment,
But how you got into this part of your role and what you're focused on. Sure,
So as you mentioned, Teams is more than two years old. In the early stages
We would get a lot of interest from customers wanting to modernize their operations, build these interesting solutions on top of teams,
And then we noticed two key things. Number one was,
You know, they wanted some more best practices
design, and those sort of guidance from our side kind of like
How do you think these things should be built? Number two was we started seeing patterns.
At the end of the day, these are line of business applications. And then the scenario started to be more repeatable.
And then when we work with customers
Right from idea generation to a fully built production app, it used to take anywhere from two to six months.
So then we were seeing a lot of inefficiencies in the process across the board having that visibility and we thought hey
Why don't we invest some in it so that at the end of the day customers are really doing the last 5%
of deployment and can
You know customizing something for their internal needs but we do rest of the work, make it super easy to get started.
We've had a lot of customers over the past couple years who wanted to build these custom
solutions in Teams, so taking a lot of their investments they've already made internally from an IT perspective or business perspective and
Bringing it to life in Teams leveraging the platform but a lot of them,
You know, where to start,
Became kind of the challenge and then when you figured out where to start, it was okay, now
I need two to six months to actually build out this concept
into a prototype that I could leverage. And as we started helping more and more customers we saw these patterns and hence app templates was
Created what you're working on. Can you maybe give the 101 on exactly what app templates are? So app templates are these production-ready,
Fully built apps on Teams and we've open sourced them. So they're housed on GitHub,
We give complete documentation on what a particular app template is, how to deploy them, how to get started.
We also figured that customers often have their internal review processes to get any app out.
It's not just one person. There are multiple stakeholders involved.
So we invested a bunch of time and resources
Into, you know, solutional reviews, data stores, anything that, info security, privacy
Those sort of teams for customers would want so we build this complete package around it
And then they're housed in GitHub so that, you know, it's really easy to get started out of the box
But if they want to configure it, build on top of it, they can totally do that easily. Awesome.
So do you personally have a couple favorite app templates? I do.
So the first app template I want a demo to you is called the FAQ Plus. Imagine if this were to be
Pinned on the left margin here, imagine how easy it would be for
employees to access help on Teams.
And then let's say I've populated this bot with Team specific questions and answers.
As a new user on Teams, I asked about how do I
[typing]
Create a team
The bot goes into the knowledge base, comes up with an answer if it has one. In this case,
I just used a publicly available URL for common Teams questions.
Let's assume that I'm not satisfied and I want something more specific to my needs. At the click of a button, I can,
Say, ask an expert and I want to know how to create private teams. The bot informs me that
They've shared the request with the expert team, along with some metadata on the status of my request. Now here's the cool part,
Behind-the-scenes. What's happening is, the bot's posting real-time notification in a team of specialists.
So here I can see someone requesting support, at the click of a button I can chat with them and you know delight them
instantaneously or if it's gonna take time, I can then just, you know, assign it to myself and then
hit submit
Now what it's doing is keeping everybody in this team on the same page.
They don't have to go to a separate application or do anything, all the context about a particular request
Remains in this track. So it kind of has a built in,
lightweight ticketing function as well
Lastly, in order to see, you know, what are the recent requests that are coming that have come in? What are the unassigned requests?
What are the assigned requests? Or I can even search for a request,
Like let's say I search for all requests that are assigned to me.
I can easily do that and then I can bring something up and
Then have a conversation around it. So kind of like brings in the Team's magic in a question and answer bot.
Typically people who provide support aren't very technical. So you give them all of the
Opportunities to provide help and support, train the bot, all within the experience of Teams itself.
And then it's not just limited to Teams FAQs, use you can use it for HR FAQS, IT FAQS, any sort of new
Change that has questions from employees. You can bring those things to bear with this experience.
So Nidhi,, thanks for showing us FAQ Plus. I love that thing.
I'm talking to customers about it all the time, but just to quick summarize,
I guess what I was seeing there and some of the main points that I took home
You know one was this is not necessarily about creating these brand new databases for Q&A
It's about connecting into resources that already exist whether that's internal in an organization
Which they most likely already have, or even to external like things like FAQ that we have for Teams online.
And you know many other resources. The other one
I found really compelling was that it gives the end user the ability to self-serve which then alleviates a lot of time that
Resources inside of our customers might be spending just answering these questions on a regular basis and then you can evolve by seeing these patterns
That we talked about before
That you can feed back into the Q&A bot. I guess the last thing I want to say to you looking back
Having done this now for quite a few months, and this being you know your main project, what advice would you give to customers
Who are about to embark on this journey who maybe come away from this call today and say okay,
We wanted leverage Team's app templates and then we want to start building one?
That's a very good question. There are three things that I would you know like to leave you with. Number one is
get all stakeholders involved early on, folks who are gonna be
You know using the app templates versus the ones that are deploying the app templates. They are often different parties.
Having buy-in early on just expedites the process
that much more. And then number two is
having
Proactively thought through change management, content, and things like that. Take FAQ Plus,
FAQ Plus for example. A bot is only as good as the content, you know,
it contains.So having a good knowledge base of
Articles, if that's in SharePoint sites or product manuals or Word documents,
Having the team to you know assemble collate all of that and pre populate the bot with, we've done a ton of work in
Simplifying that but bringing those parties in together early on just expedites everything. And then lastly, number three is,
We made it really simple to get up and running with an app template,
It takes an hour to, you know, to configure, deploy, customize,
But then after that, you know, it's a living and breathing app. So having
Appropriate governance mechanisms or teams that would be responsible for running
This would be super useful. And then this is something that you're not doing solo.
We have a ton of resources at Microsoft
We have a cloud solution architects and you know account management teams, who are there all along the way so leverage these people and resources
proactively for your advantage.
That's a great point.
And I'm going to say this out to our customers, if you have a Microsoft account team you give me a shout or give them a shout to make sure
That you're leveraging the right resources
We have tons of them out there both
Internally and through our partner network. So one last thing, Nidhi, that I want to touch on that you mentioned was
You're talking about this support usually needs to touch multiple departments.
And a lot of times what we see customers do is, though they'll work with the heads of these departments,
And I think that's great,
But if you watched our very first Teams Superheroes video where we interviewed Seng from Cerner corporation,
one thing they did regularly is they talked to the end user who is their associate and that led to huge success for them as
You know one of the most successful bots that we've had built for Teams,
and
so make sure that you're talking to your users in addition to
Multiple departments who are going to be involved and supporting this because the goal is to make everybody's life better here
Not necessarily just the IT department or a developer who worked on this. One best practice there is start
small and iterate frequently.
So you have an app template deployed in production start with a palette of 50 users and then scale it to like 50, hundred,
thousands or more.
That's a great way to you know, set yourself up for success. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us.
I'm sure we're gonna have you on here again, but really appreciate your time and support and let us know if you have any questions