Build custom Microsoft Teams apps with the new Teams Developer Portal

3 years ago 568

Microsoft aims to marque it easier to physique customized Teams apps, helping your squad bask easier and much specialized collaboration.

With much and much of america moving remotely, tools similar Zoom, Slack and Microsoft's Teams person go captious pieces of concern infrastructure. Understandably, astir of the absorption has been connected their video conferencing and online gathering tools, but tools similar Teams are besides designed to enactment caller forms of work, integrating with process automation tools to connection a caller endpoint for your workflow. By hosting each the small tasks that get successful the mode of your existent work, they're intended to assistance you support productive and debar distractions.

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It's important to recognize that Teams is simply a batch much than a mode of moving meetings. While they're important, truthful is its relation arsenic a collaboration hub. You tin deliberation of it arsenic the spot to enactment with others erstwhile you're successful the bureau oregon portion of a distributed team. That collaboration exemplary means you're going to request to physique your ain tooling that fits however your organizations and teams work, astatine the aforesaid clip arsenic folding successful third-party tools from Teams' app marketplace and managing however they're deployed and used.

Teams for developers

Microsoft comes from a developer tools background, truthful it's not astonishing that it sees Teams arsenic yet different level for your code. Right from its launch, Teams has offered a mode of hosting your contented and code, integrating them into tabs and into the platform's persistent chat panes. Tools similar Azure's Bot Framework and Microsoft 365's Adaptive Cards are astatine the bosom of Teams developer platform, portion technologies similar SharePoint supply a big for documents and collaborations.

Initially overmuch of that was handled wrong Teams itself, on with a acceptable of tools that provided a model for gathering web-based applications successful Visual Studio Code. If you wanted to customize Teams and physique your ain apps, you needed to way down documentation and physique your ain toolchain from scratch.

Introducing the Teams Developer Portal

That's each changing, with the motorboat of Microsoft's caller Teams Developer Portal. You tin deliberation of it arsenic a one-stop store for each your Teams exertion needs, whether you're penning codification oregon if you're simply managing the apps successful your instance. The portal mixes documentation and tools arsenic good arsenic hosting UI toolkits that tin assistance springiness your Teams apps a accordant look and feel.

Microsoft is giving each its Microsoft 365 web properties a akin look and feel, based connected the Fluent plan connection it's bringing to Office and Windows 11. The tract is afloat of pleasing boxes with curved corners, built utilizing the caller Fluent icons. Right from the off, you're encouraged to Get Started, taking you consecutive to the App builder conception of the portal.

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This is wherever you physique and negociate your Teams apps. Creating an app drops you consecutive into a web-based configuration tool, wherever you springiness an app a name, a description, and capable successful details of developers, its endpoint URL, arsenic good arsenic policies and mentation numbers. You tin adhd icons, link to cardinal Teams features, arsenic good arsenic mounting permissions and applying a sign-on policy.

What the apps conception of the Teams Developer Portal does is simplify the process of packaging an app for work connected the Teams app store, whether you people it successful your ain organization's tenants oregon mean to marque it disposable to anyone successful immoderate Teams lawsuit anywhere. There's adjacent a trial and validation tool, that checks whether your codification is acceptable for the store. This isn't a afloat test, it lone makes definite that your codification meets the basal Teams requirements. It doesn't trial the code, truthful you request to marque it portion of your ain bundle improvement lifecycle process.

Building apps utilizing the Developer Portal

It's important to retrieve that the Portal isn't an online exertion improvement environment. That means you indispensable download and instal your prime of Teams improvement tools, utilizing them to physique your app and its manifest. It would beryllium bully to spot Microsoft utilizing this portal to embed pre-configured instances of GitHub's Codespaces platform, implicit with web servers and Visual Studio Code, acceptable to physique codification without having to bash the enactment of mounting up a afloat improvement environment.

You inactive person to physique your app utilizing Teams' web exertion improvement tools, gathering the app and its manifest. Microsoft uses the beforehand leafage of the portal to supply speedy links for the Visual Studio Code extension, a Teams UI kit, and a illustration app to assistance you get started, arsenic good arsenic all the Teams developer documentation. While these are tools that person been disposable for immoderate time, present they're each successful 1 spot making it overmuch easier to get started.

Other tools are disposable from the Portal's tools tab, with tooling for editing and designing Adaptive Cards for usage successful your apps, arsenic good arsenic for moving with and managing artificial intelligence bots for chat integration with your apps. It's wide that this conception is simply a enactment successful progress; arsenic much Teams improvement tools go disposable you should expect to find them here. It's a small astonishing not to find immoderate of the much evident candidates, though. One that's conspicuous by its lack is the Microsoft Graph Explorer, arsenic the graph APIs are an important instrumentality for integrating Teams applications with the remainder of Microsoft 365.

Adding customized scenes to Teams

Microsoft precocious updated Teams' Together Mode to enactment customized scenes. The Developer Portal includes a instrumentality for creating and sharing your ain backgrounds utilizing your ain images. Start by uploading an representation to the portal, and past prime the fig of participants you privation to see successful a meeting. This adds outlines for participants to the gathering layout, truthful you tin resistance and driblet them into the places you want.

Each constituent is simply a layer, truthful you tin physique layered environments with antithetic elements, and with users placed appropriately. Perhaps your inheritance representation is simply a acquainted gathering room, with a abstracted array and chairs. User images tin beryllium stacked astir the table, simulating an in-person event, with Teams' layering tools allowing 1 idiosyncratic to beryllium successful beforehand of different oregon down the table. Certain spots tin beryllium assigned to a gathering organizer oregon a presenter, truthful they're ever successful the aforesaid spot successful a meeting.

The exertion has astir of the features you'd expect from a basal representation editing environment, truthful anyone acquainted with PowerPoint tin physique a Teams gathering space. There's an enactment to trial an situation successful Teams, truthful you tin beryllium definite that your abstraction is close for your meetings.

It's bully to spot galore of the tools you request to physique Teams applications successful 1 place. Microsoft has gone a agelong mode to marque this caller Developer Portal the archetypal destination for anyone who wants to physique their ain Teams services, each it needs are a fistful of other features and it volition beryllium acceptable for premier time.