Microsoft Teams could soon become a lot more personal

Using Microsoft Teams could soon become a lot more attractive thanks to a series of updates announced by the company.

With video conferencing calls set to remain a part of day-to-day work and private life for many of us, Microsoft wants to make sure its platform can provide everyone with a more personalized experience.

This includes opening up Microsoft Teams to developers, making it easier to create more enjoyable, richer meeting experiences through personalized apps and services.

Microsoft Teams for Developers

Microsoft Teams saw several mentions in CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote speech at the Build 2021 event, with the head of the company noting that the service now has about 145 million daily active users.

The platform has been supporting third-party apps for several months, but will now try to encourage more developers to work on “a new class” it calls collaborative apps.

“To help you build collaborative apps, we share new integration capabilities and improved developer tools for the organizing tier, Teams,” Microsoft revealed in a blog post.

This includes the recently improved Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. The toolkit supports React, SharePoint Framework (SPFx) or .NET and provides developers with a familiar environment with several new updates, including single-line authentication, Azure Functions integration, SPFx integration, single-line Microsoft Graph client, and streamlined hosting to an IDE and CLI.

Once completed, the newly launched Developer Portal for Microsoft Teams will make it easier for developers to register and configure their apps from a single dedicated app management console tool available over the Internet or within Teams themselves.

READ Microsoft in talks to acquire gaming chat platform Discord for $10bn
Aside from additional apps, the changes will allow Teams users to create custom scenes in Together mode through a new tool for designing scenes in the Developer Portal, adding an extra personal touch to an experience that many of us still associate with long work conversations.

Microsoft Teams will also get a new set of media APIs that the company says “provide real-time access to audio and video streams to build scenarios like transcription, translation, note-taking, insights gathering, and more.”

There’s also more interoperability with Azure Communication Services for a welcome cloud boost, the ability to build smooth components for greater mobile engagement, and the chance to create apps without having to write a single piece of HTML or CSS code thanks to using Adaptive Cards as your UI tier.

Source: wiredfocus