At Build, Teams comes into its own as the platform for a more agile world

When I joined Microsoft 25 years ago as a developer evangelist, I was inspired by our approach. We were building a platform to empower people everywhere to develop apps and experiences so they could achieve more.  

Today we continue to work on that mission. The technology landscape has rapidly evolved, but what endures is a platform designed and built to inspire developers of all types, from experienced professionals to everyday users.  

In February, I was thrilled to take on product and engineering leadership for Microsoft Teams and deepen the alignment with SharePoint to take our Microsoft 365 collaboration solution to the next level. I didn’t know then that the focus of these products—bringing people together for seamless collaboration wherever they are—would become so important so quickly as part of the much more agile environment we’re all living in.  

As Satya said in our last quarterly earnings, we’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. We’ve seen how organizations across education, healthcare, government and the private sector have embraced Teams as they navigate the shift to remote everything. Almost overnight, our meeting services increased by over 600% to help deliver this transformation.    

Like our customers, we’ve been meeting and collaborating on Teams full time, learning alongside organizations around the globe and listening to their experiences as everyone works to adjust. We’ve learned a lot, and we continue to receive valuable feedback.   

We have a bold vision for making meetings more engaging, efficient, and effective, and we will be accelerating new features we deliver each month, like the release of 3x3 view and raise hands in April and noise reduction coming soon. And some will extend existing functionality, like increasing the number of Stream meeting participants to 100,000, enabling virtual town halls and companywide meetings across the globe.  

We are also building deeper capabilities, starting with the potential of the Microsoft Graph and AI. We are moving beyond application silos to a cloud service that learns from user actions and the relationships between people, communications, content and processes to help every person and team be more productive with an intuitive user experience.  

In this vision, Teams brings intelligent communications like calls, chat, meetings and more, evolving to be our hub for teamwork and integrating applications from Microsoft and third-party developers. SharePoint brings intelligent content services for files, lists, sites, and other assets exposed both through standalone applications and sites, and increasingly, inside Microsoft Teams.  

But what’s really exciting for me given my history as a developer evangelist is that we’re not just delivering a collaborative solution to end users—Teams is also a platform for developers to build an incredible range of solutions, from low-code app building with the Power Platform to professional development with the Graph API and SharePoint Framework. 

Much of this work came to life at our Build conference this week, which we hosted on Teams to bring the developer community together for a glimpse of what’s on the horizon.  

We made several announcements during Build about new platform capabilities and developer tools for Teams that will make third-party apps more discoverable and accessible. The improvements include new tools for building Teams apps within Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, including integrated publishing workflows.  

We also unveiled new customizable templates for common business scenarios like event management, as well as industry-specific templates, including support for health care providers. We showed how custom applications from Power Apps can now be added to Teams with a single click. There’s much more, so be sure to check out the official announcement blog.  

While we continue to improve the Teams developer experience, we’re also delivering on underlying platform capabilities like Project Cortex, our new Fluid Framework, the Bookings app, and Microsoft Lists.  

Project Cortex has the potential to bring vast new forms of knowledge discovery using AI. Lists represents a breakthrough in empowering anyone to easily build tracking apps for processes and engagements. Fluid continues to make collaboration more seamless by breaking down barriers between apps. But Microsoft Lists was our biggest news - a fantastic new experience - standalone, enhancing SharePoint Lists, and integrated inside Microsoft Teams. Check out the announcement blog.

Taken together, what these capabilities mean in the real world is that, as a developer, you can easily set up a process or a workflow. A neighborhood café owner can build that curbside delivery app that she never knew she needed. A doctor’s office can add an AI assistant to a patient registry solution.  

The integration that’s happening with Teams and Lists and other core platform technologies means people can quickly bring these new end user experiences to life. If you need your application to accelerate the flow of collaborative work, we’re enabling you to do that in a way that is easy, secure, and faster than ever.  

Our belief is that the future of work will not be defined by any one company or product, but by the ingenuity of developers everywhere. To make the most of that promise, we are creating a robust platform for developers to build on. Our goal is to empower developers to reach users as they work, create, and collaborate across Windows and Microsoft 365 apps—and to build connected productivity experiences within their own apps.   

Microsoft 365 Collaboration means intelligent communications, plus content management, plus comprehensive platform tools to build on. This is what we’ll be rallying to create for you with no compromises: the most innovative experience in every category, combined with a unique experience that increases user and team productivity, developer agility, IT security and compliance—all at lower costs. 

I will close with what I have long shared in every event where I have participated, and we saw again at Build. We are blessed with the “Best Community in Tech” that hosts free events to share our latest roadmap, their best practices, facilitate feedback for us, and, most importantly, foster life-long connections and friendships. In place of these in person events, I am proud and grateful to the community for hosting these virtually. The picture above is leaders from Teams and SharePoint getting ready. Up next week for me is the Microsoft 365 Virtual Marathon and Microsoft 365 May from our community in Australia and New Zealand. We look forward to continuing to learn and build together.