>> Hello everyone, and welcome to
Learn Together building apps with Microsoft Teams.
I'm Christina Warren, I'm a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft,
and I'm so excited to be here with all of you virtually
as we learn more and learn together about Microsoft Teams
and building apps for Microsoft Teams.
We've got a bunch of sessions today
that will show you how to get started,
how to build new applications,
how to integrate your existing applications.
But before we get into that content,
I wanted to bring in my friend Todd Anglin,
who is the Principal PM Manager for M365 here at Microsoft.
He's also got Isabel London with him who is from the Teams team.
But Todd, I wanted to start with you.
What can we look forward to seeing
today and what are you excited about seeing today?
>> Morning, Christina. Thanks. I'm pretty excited today.
We've got a lot to cover.
We're going to cover a lot in the next, what is it?
Hundred and twenty-two hours,
120 hours, 120 minutes, two hours?
But we're going to talk about how you build apps for Teams.
A lot of us now are spending a lot more time on Teams.
We all know that Teams usage has
exploded here during the pandemic.
There are a 115 million daily active users,
so we're spending a lot more time in Teams.
It turns out that you can develop apps for Teams.
There's a lot of extensibility points and I think a lot of
developers just don't even know what you can do.
So we want to spend time today helping developers,
helping you-all understand, why should you build these apps?
Why should you extend Teams?
What can you do? How do you do it?
We're going to cover all of that with a lot of guests,
and lot people helping us out here, coming up.
>> Yeah. I know we have Isabel,
and Isabel I said your name wrong earlier, I'm sorry.
Isabel Lubin, who's here from the Teams team.
What exactly do you do on the Teams team?
Will you tell me a little bit about that?
>> Yeah, and thank you for having me on.
I'm really excited to be here.
I'm one of the Product Leads on Microsoft Teams Platform.
One of the areas that my team looks after is
making sure that developers of all backgrounds,
any level of experience,
have really great tools and resources for building awesome apps.
We try to make sure that wherever you're coming from,
you have a way to build an app for Microsoft Teams.
>> Fantastic. Where are people coming from?
What are the types of developers or
users even that we're seeing build teams apps right now?
>> It's really all over the place,
and that's actually one of the most exciting things to see is that
we're finding that customers from any vertical,
whether that's finance, health care, education,
can really identify a way that they can
improve Teams to really suit their needs.
We're finding that there are tons of different scenarios and
tons of different ways that people are extending Teams.
I think that's one of the real powers of Platform,
is that we're building all
of these different extensibility points,
and making it possible for you to make Teams your own.
>> Yeah.
>> I know, Isabel, I was just mentioning how much Teams has
grown in the last nine months during the pandemic.
I know anytime you scale an engineering project, that fast,
that big, it's bound to make somethings harder.
You learned anything about how to do engineering as
this has scaled up, anything surprised you?
>> Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really great question.
We were listening in on one of the watch parties
[inaudible] your talking about,
how exciting it is
that Teams has been able to innovate in that case.
I think every time you really
focus on scaling and innovation at the same time,
you really need to make sure that you're able to
balance those two different priorities.
I think just watching the team,
make sure that we're responsive and able to have
a really great experience for all of these users as they onboard,
and critically need Teams and the Platform to work for them,
we'll also be able to innovate.
My one personal learning is the importance of caching.
If you don't cache for long enough,
then you have all of the clients hitting
services to try to update.
But also if you cache for too long,
then you have users with stale information.
So really hitting that balance and making sure that you're
thinking user first all the time,
has been really important for the team.
>> That makes a lot of sense.
>> Yeah. On that note,
before we throw to our first session,
I just wanted to know what should developers
keep in mind when they're building for Teams?
>> Great question. Number one,
think about what your users are doing.
They're in Teams, they're
chatting with each other, they're having meetings.
Think about what they're trying to accomplish
and think about how your app is going to
improve what they're already doing.
If you're building something like an Expenses app,
when users are chatting with each other or in meetings,
when might they need to use an Expenses app,
and what scenarios are you designing for?
We find that when you design scenario
first and really think about what users are trying to accomplish,
that you're going to end up building really great apps.
>> Fantastic. Well, Isabel thank you so much for talking with me.
Todd, you and I are going to chat more a little bit later,
but now we're actually going to go to our very first session where
our own Burke Holland and Dan Wahlin are going to
present a fantastic keynote for
us about bringing web apps to Teams.
Check it out. All right,
that was fantastic stuff from Dan and Burke.
I'm going to bring in back Todd and
Isabel to talk with us a little bit about what we just saw,
and some other things we can look forward to
developing with Microsoft Teams.
Todd, let's go ahead and start with you.
What are your big takeaways from what we
just saw from our opening with Burke and Dan?
>> Yeah, it's a cool demo.
What I love about what they showed there,
I know a lot of us are in places where we have those
line-of-business apps that are part of our daily lives.
It requires to go find a website, login.
It shows how you can really simplify a lot of
people's lives by bringing things into Teams,
and how you can go even further and really
streamline the way someone works
by going even deeper into integration,
with things like bots and
some of the things Dan and Burke showed off.
Hopefully I think everyone got to see that it's
a lot of different places you can integrate to Teams.
We're going to go now and the rest of the day and show
you how to do what you just saw.
A lot of fun content to come,
but I also want to point out that what we
saw there was in the context of a line of business app.
The same concepts apply if you're
a startup and you have a SaaS app,
you want to think about integrating that into Teams,
or maybe you're a student and you want to build
something for your organization or your learning institution.
All of these concepts apply the same.
If you have an idea for building a Teams app,
or you're thinking about building one, we want to help you.
In fact, we've set up a forum where you can
share with us a little bit about what you want to build.
So we can actually set up some time as
the developer advocacy team to talk to
you about your idea and help you out.
Head on over to akms/teamsappconsult,
C-O-N-S-U-L-T,
and give us a little bit of
information and we'll reach out to you.
We want to help you out. We want to help make your Team's app
successful and hopefully guide you a bit further down that path.
>> Awesome. So aka.MS/teamsappconsult.
That's fantastic.
Isabel, what did you think about that?
That's a pretty cool demo, right?
>> It's really awesome.
I think just in general, we're really excited to see SSO
coming out as well as one of
the things that was highlighted there.
>> Yeah. Isabel, what's
the coolest app that you've seen developed for Teams so far?
>> Really hard question.
I think in general, I love all of the apps that folks
are building that address their really niche scenario.
In education cases, how
students can stay engaged and things like that.
I personally love Kahoot!.
It was actually first a standalone app,
and is now integrated into Teams.
I use it for a lot of some of
the internal onboarding programs that I help run.
That's one that I think really meets this niche that
I have of wanting to be able to
have interactive cuisine experiences,
that break up some of these onboarding events that we hold.
>> Actually, I think a lot of the watch parties,
they are using Kahoot!
as well. So it's a great call out.
>> It's a great app.
>> Fantastic.
>> I was going to ask you Isabel, we saw a lot of
the core features in Teams in that demo,
but I know some of the people in today's live stream
are experienced Teams Developers.
For those who are a little more familiar with the platform,
what should developers know that's maybe new in the platform?
Something new they can check out to go
even deeper with their app dev journey.
>> Yeah, there are a lot
of different areas that we're making investments in.
I think just really in general,
focusing on making sure that there are great tools
for both professional devs and citizen devs.
The new Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extensions
that help you build out scaffold.
The integration with Power Platform is really
powerful and really helps folks
get started building out apps quickly.
I'm personally super excited about Meetings Extensibility,
which is how you can start building apps for meetings.
I think it's one of these ways that you can really
see how apps can be fully
integrated into what you're trying to do.
Since we've released Meetings Extensibility,
it's a feature that I've been using
in probably every single meeting I have,
that really requires deep interaction with
the other people that are working with me.
>> So these are apps that run in
the meeting while you're meeting with other people?
The app's right there in that surface?
>> Yeah, you can access the app from the upper bar.
Even in that polling example,
we did a virtual offsite the other day,
and we were using Polls to
gauge sentiment while we were doing the offsite
to make sure that all voices were heard.
That's a really great way that users can now interact.
>> All right, very cool.
>> That's awesome. You told us
what app is one of your favorites, you love Kahoots!.
What is an app that you would wish that someone would develop?
>> Oh, great question. Now that
we've released Meetings Extensibility,
all I want is an app that will
play elevator music into the meeting in
that five-minute silence before everyone actually
starts talking and you're sitting there, and do you say something?
Do you not say something. I want to be able to just hit
a button and start playing elevator music.
>> Do, do, do, do, do. [inaudible]
>> I love it. I actually think that's a great idea.
That would go well with the AppConsult. Right, Todd?
That's something people should reach
out and learn more about building.
>> I think the great call out,
that there are all kinds of different apps you can build.
It doesn't have to be just the line of
business or the productivity scenario.
People are spending their days and their time
here. Elevator music app?
Sure. The sky is the limit,
but send us those ideas, let us help you out,
help you figure out how to be successful.
I also wanted to say before we go back to
the next segment here and talking more about how you do this,
that we know we can't teach you how to
do all of this in two hours.
No one can learn a master topic that fast.
So we have prepared a free learning course
on Microsoft Learn that's
aligned to all the content you're seeing today.
You can go self-paced,
go through all these topics,
learn the ins and outs that you need to know to be successful.
We created a challenge around that to
incentivize you to go through that content.
It's a Teams Learn Challenge,
and the first 35 people that complete
the challenge will be eligible to win Xbox Game passes.
So we're not above bribery.
Head on over there, check out
the Teams Learn Challenge,
aka.ms/teamslearnchallenge is where you can find it.
It will go live right at the end of today's event.
It'll give you a reason to go through that learning path.
Take what you've learned today, apply it to get hands-on,
and hopefully build that elevator music app for Isabel here.
So she has that app in her app catalog.
>> Indeed, fantastic stuff.
Check out that link, aka.ms/teamslearnchallenge, as Todd said.
We're not about bribery,
and now we're going to go into
our next section from Aisha and Tommy. Check it out.