So welcome everybody, thank you for joining us for another edition of Teams Superheroes.
I'm with Trent Hazy, I'm from platform engineering on Teams.
And you guys know me, Jace Moreno, I am the Team's Customer Success Lead for Teams platform.
So today I want to talk to Trent a little bit about using apps in Teams.
It's a question we get all the time from customers
from various roles.
Whether it's developers, IT professionals, the end-users, the business.
We want to address a couple things today.
One of them though, I think is a baseline.
Maybe help me
out Trent here on what is available when it comes to apps in Microsoft Teams.
So there's actually three flavors of apps in Teams.
The first are Microsoft apps
So when you see something like SharePoint, Forms, Power BI, those come from us.
The second layer is third-party apps, so those are apps like Trello or ServiceNow, tools
that you would use outside of Teams.
And then the third layer is line of business apps or custom apps.
Those can be built using our API so that you can build something from scratch.
That's awesome. Love it. Great, great summary.
So if I'm a user though, it's great to know these apps are available.
Why would I use them in Teams, though?
Because I've already got access to them outside of Teams things might be working for me okay
the way they are today
What's the additional value of why I'd consider bringing them into that experience.
So it's a great question.
There's really two reasons
The first is there's a collaboration that happens in Teams
so when I see a report from an app, if I want to collaborate and actually get my
questions answered, if I want to, you know, dive deeper and have a conversation with someone,
having the report and the conversation together
really makes me more efficient.
The second is,
it can be proactive.
You know, maybe I there's something happening in this tool elsewhere and I'm not proactively
looking at it
But it can tell me something just happened.
That makes me infinitely more efficient.
that the information's coming to me.
So I love that I guess maybe a quick summary
is just to reiterate for everybody out there
it's insanely valuable to have the collaboration aspect where you're kind of bringing
together all of your tools and reducing that tool sprawl
and context switching between apps, but where you really start to become
Superhero is when I don't have to leave the part of the Team's canvas that I'm in
And I can interact with different services and applications and tools right from where
I am, whether that's a conversation or a channel
Whatever it is. I love it. It's great, great summary.
So, enabling apps in Teams now.
Now sometimes we do this presentation, you and I have been caught in this before, and
we're talking to customers
There's an end-user who
Hears about an application and it sparks an interest and then they go to their store and
the app might not be available.
Why is that?
Walk us through what's going on there.
Yep, yep, so there's something that happens with the tenant admin that gives them control
over the apps that are made available
It's called a permission policy.
So some apps might be blocked from use in the tenant
Permission policies allow you to control which apps are available to which users
So sometimes they might be blocked entirely or might be blocked from specific users
Got it.
That's awesome.
So, why would they be blocked then is another question?
Great question.
Usually it's security and compliance.
So the admin is concerned about where the data is stored or what personal information
is made available to that third party.
So they really just wanted to lock it down for a specific reason.
Yeah perfect and understandable.
We get why you'd do that.
If I'm an admin I'd be asking now at this point
What is Microsoft doing to help me enable applications from my tenant?
Especially the ones if you think about the people are already using every day, how do
we make that easier?
Yeah
We actually have a resource that outlines the security and compliance details of every
third-party application in our store
and we'll share that link with you so you can see.
Awesome.
Now last question, I'll help you on this
So let's imagine in a perfect world,
I've got my Team's environment set up,
I'm a tenant admin and we've been open to allowing apps in Teams like many of our customers have,
How do I get the end-users to discover these applications and use them better and really
understand what's possible?
Yeah, one of my favorite ways of doing this is actually going into a different channel
and see what they're using there.
Because that usually is a bunch of my colleagues and they're probably gaining some productivity
Just by using those apps.
So I'm gonna go steal some of their tricks and use them myself.
Cool. Now, let's say I'm maybe even
a tenant admin and let's say we've taken a
custom or homegrown solution we built internally and we're bringing that into Teams.
We've had some great scenarios there for ya in customer examples
What is my best way to get people to leverage that experience?
There's actually a different policy called a setup policy and it allows you to pin an
app to the navigation bar, the left rail
That will increase usage by sometimes five or ten times.
It's making it visible, really easy to find you don't have to remember
Oh, it's in that channel over there and let me go find it.
It's right there in navigation and it makes a lot easier
I mean that that's the last thing.
I'd love to end on that piece right there.
This is
Taking your existing investments, bringing them to life in Teams, pinning them
So they're discoverable for the end-user can increase the value of the solution essentially
inside of Teams.
That's awesome.
Trent, you're a legend.
This definitely won't be the last time we hear from this man here soon
But thank you so much for your time today.
Thanks for having me. Let us know if you have any questions.