Microsoft announced that they have released open-source app templates for Microsoft Teams. Applications built into Microsoft Teams make it the Hub for Work by delivering integrated experiences to users using a unified canvas. Teams apps can empower your business, office, and first line workers by letting them take advantage of your backend systems all from the palm of their hand.
Microsoft Teams Apps
Microsoft Teams Apps are web applications that can be hosted on an organization’s web server or in the cloud. These apps can consist of tab pages, bots, connectors and rich cards delivered via messaging extensions. The definition of the app is contained in an application package that is uploaded to Teams and installed in channels.
What Kind of Apps Can you Build on Teams?
The Microsoft Teams platform offers you several extensibility points for building apps. On Teams you can build:
- Tabs: that allow you to expose your whole web app inside Teams to let users conveniently access it without leaving Teams
- Bots: that help people complete tasks through conversations. Bots are a great way to expose relevant features of your app and guide users through the scenario like a personal assistant.
- Messaging extensions: to help people complete tasks in a visually-compelling way. Messaging extensions are similar to bots but are more visually oriented and ideal for showing rich data.
- Webhooks: to bring notifications from external systems into conversations.
Why Teams App Templates?
- Open Source, free to use production-ready apps.
- It’ll help you Solve real-world problems.
- Great source of best practice and how-to for developers.
Key Benefits:
- Communicate consistent messages: provide a concise one-stop destination for company news, policy updates, market wins, alerts etc.
- Establish a recognizable employment brand.
- Deliver messages from the top that are congruent with the organization’s mission, vision, and culture.
- Give employees a voice by collecting their reactions and feedback — an increasingly meaningful component of improving employees’ satisfaction with their employer.
- Get feedback from recipients to encourage an inclusive culture of interaction and engagement, something the corporate communication team was struggling to do with email-based broadcasts.
- Improve processes and procedures and ultimately create greater efficiencies and reduces costs.
FAQ Plus App Template
FAQ Plus is a conversational Q&A bot that provide answers to frequently asked questions by users. If the bot can’t answer the question, then it can hand off to a human being to answer instead. FAQ Plus includes the ability for questions to be posted to a specific channel for ‘experts’ to pick them up and start a chat directly with the user. FAQ
The Plus App template supports improved Q&A resolutions by enabling a team of experts to complete the following:
- Add new Q&As directly to the knowledge base using message extensions.
- Edit and delete Q&A pairs added by a bot.
- Track the revision history of Q&As.
- Configure an answer with additional details to display as an adaptive card.
Company Communicator App
The Company Communicator App enables leaders and communication specialists to send messages directly to multiple teams, employees, or any subset of an internal audience, over chat or in a Teams channel. Company Communicator is the perfect tool to send messages straight to the place where employees are already working. The app provides an easy interface for designated users to create, preview, collaborate and send messages. Additionally, it provides a foundation to build custom targeted communication capabilities such as custom telemetry on how many users acknowledged or interacted with a message.
Note: Funding from Microsoft might be available based on eligibility.
How to Get Started?
If you would like to obtain more detailed information, see some case scenarios and better understand how this templates can be customized based on your needs and will benefit your organization, reach out to our specialists here to help you get started.
