Microsoft Teams has taken the enterprise world by storm. Since its inception back in 2017, Teams has seen an incredible pace of growth, having 115 million daily active users in October 2020. To put that metric in perspective, 13 million daily active users used Teams in July of the previous year.

If you’re building an enterprise app, it’s essential to consider integration with Teams. Fortunately, Microsoft makes it very easy to connect your apps with Teams. Here’s how to provide that cohesive experience for your employees or customers!

Understand the Microsoft Teams App Ecosystem

First, it’s essential to understand the app connection types within Microsoft Teams. Apps are a combination of capabilities and entry points. For example, you might have an app that displays your company’s refund policies within a tab in Teams. That way, when call center employees need to reference it, all the essential information is right there. In this case, the entry point is the tab in the channel, and the capability is the information that the call center employee can see.

There are four primary types of apps within Teams: tabs, bots, messaging extensions, and webhooks.

Tabs are what you would expect – hosted webpages within the Microsoft Teams shell. They can retrieve the user context and some other essential information to display more relevant data.

Bots turn typed words into actions. For example, you could have a bot that looks for something about “reviewing my code” and sends a link to a pull request to all team members. Bots are typically developed with the Microsoft Bot Framework, although there is no requirement to do so.

Messaging extensions are an intriguing capability as they allow the sharing of external data within a conversation. You can also leverage this functionality to act on a message. For example, you could have an app that creates a ticket for a technician whenever a customer wants assistance.

Finally, you can augment Microsoft Teams with webhooks. These are an excellent way to send notifications from another app to a Teams channel. A software development company might have a webhook that sends a Teams message whenever a daily build completes, for example.

Benefits of Apps Within Teams

Microsoft Teams has become the de facto application for communication in many companies (along with Outlook). As such, it has become an ideal place to put apps that help augment workflows. Adding your app to Teams means that you can leverage the existing user authentication (AAD) and provide your app’s functionality in an easy-to-use and easy-to-remember location. Plus, it makes distributing your apps and training people relatively easy!

For example, let’s suppose you have a custom ticketing system to handle customer service requests. You could have a webhook that takes an online inquiry form and posts it to a customer service Teams channel. Then, your representatives could use Teams to coordinate who has the best expertise on the subject. If a ticket needs creating for the backend team to look at, you could use a messaging extension to make that ticket with all the relevant information. You could then have a bot that your representative could say something like “send ticket email to customer,” which would auto-fill the details and let the customer know the ticket’s status.

The above example is a simple one, but it highlights how connecting your app with Teams can have significant benefits for productivity!

Connect Your App with Microsoft Teams Today

At INVID, we have extensive experience creating many different types of apps. We have the expertise necessary to connect your apps with Microsoft Teams to produce a powerful solution for your employees and customers!

If you’re interested in making your app work with Teams, please contact us! We would love to learn more about your project and see how our Office and Teams experts can help connect your apps!