>> Hi welcome to another episode of Teams On Air.
I'm your host Delanda Coleman.
And today we're going to be talking about how to become
a power user using slash commands,
message extensions, as well as the app store.
But before we get started,
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All right. With that we're going to get started and
I want to introduce my guest Harysh Menon.
Thanks for joining us today.
>> Glad to be here.
>> All right Harysh, you've been at
Microsoft for a while now. How long has it been?
>> I have been at Microsoft
about two and a half years now.
>> Two and a half years.
And in that two and a half years
what have you been doing?
>> I was with the Virtual Studio Team Services Team,
primarily in the Virtual Studio Marketplace division.
And since then, I've moved on to Teams and now
I'm part of the Messaging Extensions
and Power BI Extensions Team.
>> Awesome. So you're going to show us exactly
how we can use it and
become power users of the application.
>> Absolutely.
>> So tell me how since your team,
since you've moved over to the Team's team
and you've been using the tool,
how does it transform
the way that you collaborate with your colleagues?
>> Microsoft's a fast paced work environment and Teams is
a great way to sort of integrate
all your communications in one place.
It also integrates with your SharePoint,
your files, all the
apps now I'll be showing you pretty soon.
So it's a single place for
me to get my work done. Pretty simple.
>> Awesome. Cool. Well with that,
let's just jump right into
the demo and show us what it can do.
>> Great. Okay. So search is
one of the key ways to get work done in teams.
So we've now integrated that
search with commands as well as
apps and moved it to a central location front
and center on the top of the app.
We now call this the command box and we've introduced
special slash commands as well
as the ability to access apps as well.
So let's take a sample scenario.
Suppose I'm just new to this team.
I've come in and my manager
seems to have pinged me, Miriam.
So if I go in there. It looks
like there's a conference coming up in
New York and I should be attending it.
So it's my first task that my manager has given me,
so obviously very important stuff.
So let me just set my status
to "Do Not Disturb" so that we can get going.
Sure I can go and send it to the profile, et cetera,
but now with slash commands,
you can actually set
everything right from the command box.
So I just say slash and I can say
"DND" to set my status to do not disturb.
Hit enter and it will update my status.
>> That's pretty cool. So what
happens when you're on Do Not Disturb?
>> So on Do Not Disturb, basically,
everyone I'm interacting with knows that I'm
actually in a focused time zone right now
and because of it
they will think twice before messaging me,
or calling me, as well as,
you can't actually call me
when I'm in Do Not Disturb mode.
So that I have time to focus on the work.
>> Okay, great. So they
can call you but it will just go to voicemail.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Awesome.
>> So as you can see on the top right,
my status has changed to Do Not Disturb.
Okay. So I remember something about
a New York conference being mentioned
in the Pipeline center.
Sure I can go to Teams and I'll get to it.
But hey you're a power user
you need to be able to do it quickly.
So just get into the command box,
say slash "Go To" And just type in the channel names.
In this case, it's "Pipeline".
As you can see it just shows up right there,
click on it and you are in the Pipeline channel.
And here it looks like the Pradeep has mentioned
something about the New York event.
And from the replies,
it looks like Alex will be going.
Okay so I'm new in this team so I
don't know exactly who Alex is.
So we now introduce
a quick way to just find out just that.
>> Wow.
>> So as part of the command box,
we also introduced the Who app
which basically lets you know who is in the organization,
who reports to whom, et cetera.
And you can access that from the command box.
So you just say "/who" and type in the name Alex Wilber.
And will take you
directly into the Who app
and give me information on Alex.
So it looks Alex is a Marketing Assistant
and I wonder who his Manager is.
And it looks like he is in my team. That's really good.
>> Oh great. So from the command box,
you can quickly find Teams and that's
really helpful because as you become
part of more and more teams you know the list of teams
on that left navigation could get
pretty long and rather than sorting through them,
you can just type in the name.
>> Go to your team.
>> And I love this new feature that you know, Who, right?
Like if you're in
a large organization like we are here at Microsoft,
you don't always know who someone is,
and so here's a great way that you can see who
they are and all the details with this particular person.
>> Yes.
Who is one of our first party
apps and it's actually a lot more
powerful than just finding
out who a particular person is.
For instance, if you look at the list
of commands of what it can do.
You can see there's a bunch of questions it can answer.
It can answer who that particular person is,
who they report to, even some of
the ones like, "Who knows about".
So that's like an expert thing like,
who knows about the New York event?
Who knows about sales?
Who knows about marketing? If you really new in the team,
that's a really nice way to find
out who to talk to about a particular topic.
>> Yeah. Awesome. So now you have no excuse,
so this is social.
You can find out in Teams who's
who and exactly what they're working on.
>> Absolutely.
>> Awesome.
>> So looks like Alex is going to be in
New York with me for this particular event.
I can chat with him.
But let me just try a call instead.
It's better to do this on the Voice.
So again I could go press the call, bla, bla,bla.
But you're a power user,
let's do this from the command box.
>> Yeah.
>> So you just do "/call",
and type in Alex's name,
that shows up right there, and
boom you're into a call directly with Alex.
>> Awesome.
So you don't even have to like hunt
around for his contact information,
you just know his name let's call him, "/call".
>> Yup. Absolutely.
>> Cool.
>> Okay so, say,
my call with Alex is done.
We're going to be in New York together.
Let's see what the weather is like in
New York because I'm going to be traveling there.
Is it going to be chilly, et cetera?
So like I said before we've
now integrated apps into the command box as well.
So when you just hit "@" in the command box,
it gives you a list of apps that you've installed.
There's also a link to go to the store,
which I'll come to it in a little bit,
where you can install more.
So in this case, I have a Weather App
right here within the command box.
>> Yeah.
>> So I'll just say "@weather" and search for New York.
And there you go. I can see that it's
39 degrees in New York. Really chilly but not so bad.
>> So you're going to have to pack
a couple of jackets and
some gloves. That's freezing to me.
>> Yeah.
>> And so what if you found something
interesting on another app and you wanted to
share that experience with a user?
>> All the apps are accessible via the "@command".
And when you go to the store you can actually see
a list of all the messaging extensions
that we have access to.
There's a bunch like Places,
YouTube, Images, and so on.
There's a few first party ones like VSTS
as well and many third party ones like Trello,
Wrike, Wikipedia, et cetera.
>> Awesome.
>> And just as quick note,
all of these could actually be used
directly from chat as well.
So for instance in this case if
I just go back to the chat with Alex.
I can say, "Hey, you know what?
We're going to New York.
Let's meet up for breakfast before the conference."
So I can just say, @Places,
and search for a particular place.
For instance, let's look for a cafe.
And you can see a bunch of options show up.
Let's just pick this one.
And you get, that's entered into the conversation.
And you can say, "How about meeting for lunch here?"
And you can get directions directly from the car,
and you can also find out when the restaurants open,
in some cases we also get
trading information from sources like Yelp.
So it's a quick way to make more engaging conversation.
>> That's pretty cool. So now it starts off with,
we're talking about New York.
We have a business meeting
there and you're sharing the details.
Now you can even extend that into, okay,
here's where we're going to meet,
and we can actually add the directions directly in there.
And so I can imagine Alex being on
the other end with his mobile phone,
he sees the place, and he can click directions.
And it's pretty simple.
>> Yup.
>> Awesome.
>> Okay.
>> Now, I mentioned,
at the beginning of the show I talked about
the folks watching us on YouTube
to make sure that they subscribe.
Now what if you, as a end user,
stumbled on something on YouTube,
and you wanted to share that with Alex.
How could you do that?
>> Absolutely. I want to tell
Alex about this great show that I heard about.
Hey, this is Teams On Air Show.
And I can just say @youtube, to bring up YouTube,
and search for Teams On Air. And there you go.
>> Nice. So, and then you could send
him a link that opens up
directly to the Teams On Air Show?
>> Yup. So when he clicks on this particular card,
it takes him into
a browser and where he can basically view the video.
>> Awesome. Cool. I want everybody
watching right now to download
the YouTube app in your team's client and
make sure that you share the Teams On Air Show.
Pretty cool. All right.
So let's walk through so what else can we do,
as a user, to become a power user in Teams?
>> There's a whole list of slash commands,
I've only shown you a small subset of them.
So if you just go into the command box and
type the key "/" you get a whole list of them.
And there's a bunch like, for instance,
you can find out more about Teams
itself using the "/help" you can
look at "/org" to figure out who somebody reports to.
You can see what my unread messages are.
You can do "/mentions" which I use all the time
because you get mentioned from
different things across the teams.
So you do "/mentions",
it takes you to your activity feed
with all your mentions in one place.
So there's a bunch of commands that we've added and we're
working to add many more to this space.
We're also looking with many third party developers
to sort of add more apps into the app store.
And we've seeing submissions coming all the time.
So it's ever growing.
>> Great. Thanks Harysh.
That was really great.
And I'm sure many of us are going to start becoming
power users thanks to
the slash commands and the @mentions.
You mentioned the store before,
so let's talk about
the Microsoft Team Store and what can we do there?
>> Sure. So we've introduced the store quite recently,
we've added an entry point right within the app itself.
So on the bottom left, you can see the Store icon.
So when you click into it, there's
a whole list of extensions that we have right now.
There's over 150 extensions that are by
third party and first party developers.
And we have various ways to
integrate with Teams so that basically,
what we're trying to do is make this the hub for
all your communication as well as all your work.
So to really make you productive.
So there's different ways you can integrate
for instance in your team,
you can add a "Bot", you can add a "Tab",
you can add messaging extensions.
And all of these sort of work together
to sort of give you,
to make Teams a central place to get all the work done.
>> Yeah. And it's a great way to bring in
business processes and other applications that you,
that your team leverages to get work done
without necessarily having to
build code or custom integration.
>> Absolutely.
>> I love browsing the Store and
all the extensions that are available in there.
Now I remember in the beginning you said
that you used to work on Visual Studio,
is there a Visual Studio app?
>> Absolutely.
There is a Visual Studio Teams Services app.
So you can just go in here and search for VSTS,
you can see it comes right up.
It has a bunch of integrations,
you can pin a tab right into
your channel where you can actually have
your camera on board and view your work.
Or you can have a connector which
basically post updates about your work items.
Or in this case, you can simply
have a message extension as well.
So for instance, I can go back to
my chat with Miriam and say,
"Hey you know what, I've actually started
work on the New York stuff".
So I just go in to the VSTS extension,
and it loads my work that was assigned to me.
And I can click and say, "Hey I started on this".
>> So you can
let her know that you started on a particular work.
Awesome and that's really cool.
And that's a really great way,
again like I mentioned earlier,
to bring in your business processes right into
the chat so that the communications are just richer.
Awesome. Thanks, Harysh for joining us today.
You've done a great job of showing us how to become
a power user of Microsoft Teams.
>> Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here,
and I hope people use
slash commands and @commands all the time.
>> Yeah. And don't forget to
share the Teams On Air episode with your colleagues.
Well that wraps up another episode of Teams On Air.
In two weeks, we'll actually be at Enterprise Connect,
we'll be showcasing
our vision for intelligent communication.
So make sure that you take some time to join us there.
We'll have a show from Enterprise Connect and
we'll be streaming live on YouTube.
So make sure that you check us out at that time.
All right guys, thanks again for joining us.
And we'll see you in Enterprise Connect.