Have it your way: Building Microsoft Teams as a platform for innovation

The concept of extensibility, or software’s ability to have its functionality built upon or extended by others, is something I’ve been passionate about my entire career. In my first job at Microsoft as a developer evangelist, one of the early things we did was a satellite broadcast on how to customize Office with Visual Basic for Applications.

Satya was on that show with me. It was 1993.

Given that we were thinking about Excel as a platform 30 years ago, you could say this idea of making our applications both general purpose and customizable has been a part of Microsoft’s DNA from the beginning. For those keeping score at home, today there are more than 2,000 JavaScript APIs for Excel.

That thinking was our guide when we launched SharePoint in 2001. It was designed for people to easily make information hubs and collaborate on documents right out of the box. Then people could customize it for workflow approvals, HR portals, inventory management—whatever their needs were.

This was a major reason SharePoint became the fastest-growing product in Microsoft’s portfolio. Early on, we estimated that for every dollar Microsoft made our partners made five dollars building apps and solutions on top of it. We were thrilled by the sizable revenue prospects for ISVs and other partners investing in SharePoint solutions.

Today, a thriving Microsoft partner ecosystem employs 17 million people worldwide and serves customers across every continent. Our passion for ecosystems that lift everyone up continues to drive the way we think about the cloud and our services. The way we work has rapidly evolved in recent years, so we want to create an environment for other innovators to build on that, where brilliant ideas can thrive and be quickly brought to life. It’s that mindset we’ve brought to Teams.

The innovation flywheel

When we create technology that others can build on top of, what we see from that is a flywheel of innovation that starts to spin and quickly gains momentum. Today we’re seeing the same effect with Teams:

• Microsoft provides low-cost, ubiquitous, general-purpose tools.
• Partners, developers, and software engineers build upon the platform to address specific needs.
• Customers benefit from that specialized functionality. In Teams, we see this worldwide in classrooms, hospitals, manufacturing, and so much more.
• With more sockets to plug into, customized and industry-specific solutions are brought into the ecosystem to add value and inspire others to do the same.
• The innovation ecosystem grows with each new investment from the developer community, moving industries forward in their digital transformation journeys.

This week we’re seeing this cycle in action with some exciting announcements exciting announcements about the ability to add Teams apps directly into meetings, updates to low code tools from Microsoft Power Platform, and news about how we’re working with partners to integrate deep, industry-specific line-of-business applications as well. 

Providing a broad canvas

Whether it’s new ISV apps in the app store or custom developers taking advantage of the canvas, we’re trying to build the broadest, most integrated surface across the Microsoft 365 platform so there’s a place for everyone to plug in, and so those innovations can be available anywhere. 

At Build we announced that we have enabled people to publish, share, and use Power Apps in Teams to collaborate with colleagues and access everything quickly without breaking flow. Today’s announcement also builds on that piece, with the availability of the new Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents apps for Teams, as well as a new data management tool called Dataverse for Teams (formerly known as Project Oakdale).

Here’s how I think about the building blocks coming together: SharePoint (and now Dataverse) can provide the storage. Power Apps enables the rapid development and deployment of tailored applications. And Teams serves as the front-end of it all, bringing the Microsoft 365 collaboration and communications experience into a single hub.

Together, these tools provide powerful low-code functionality for connecting, building, and automating processes. Organizations can solve business challenges right inside Teams without needing to deeply engage with professional developers.

Looking ahead, we’re also thinking about how solutions built for Teams can integrate with other surfaces across Microsoft 365, like incorporating the Power Platform into SharePoint.

We believe it’s important to bring not only collaboration but also security, data management, and powerful extensible tools to every person in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. And because Teams is inherently cross-platform, you build applications once, and they are available across all platforms and devices.

Empowering everyone to innovate

On top of the breadth of integration options, we also want to empower everyone—developers, ISVs, partners, and line of business developers—to leverage these tools. That’s why you see us pulling together assets from Azure, Power Platform, SharePoint, and Teams into a more holistic platform.

Professional developers can build with the tools they’re already familiar with, whether that’s the Open Web Stack or open-source JavaScript frameworks like React, or Microsoft tools and frameworks like the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and the Bot Framework. They don't have to learn anything new to bring applications to life in Teams.

Low-code or even no-code developers can easily build apps, workflows, and bots in Teams using our Power Platform integration. If you’re an in-house developer with a tight deadline, we can help you build a delightful application faster than ever.

And then there are those who aren’t developers at all. The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) we released last summer allows you to design a web page out of building blocks from Microsoft and our partners. That capability is valuable in Teams and the incredibly strong adoption numbers we see for SPFx are bearing that out.

So if your application is content-centric, do it in the SharePoint Framework; it’ll run on the web and run in Teams. If your application is a line of business structured app, build it in Power Platform; it can run standalone in Teams and SharePoint. And if you’re in the software business, you can have it any way you want. 

Teams Meetings – a new developer opportunity

People everywhere are spending so much time in virtual or hybrid meetings, and we’re prioritizing improvements to that part of your day. We're excited to be doing this work—whether it's doctor-patient care, education and learning management systems, or firstline workers on factory floors—bringing the tools people need to make meetings more productive and engaging.

At Ignite we announced the ability to integrate apps into Teams meetings, encouraging industry partners to add their apps to the Teams app store to enhance productivity across the meetings lifecycle. As part of today’s news, we’re announcing nearly 20 new Teams apps for meetings from partners like Asana, HireVue, Monday.com and others. These will be generally available by the end of the month in the Teams app store, which already has more than 700 apps available.

Our customers have found a lot of value from these third-party integrations with Teams. For example, you can now surface project management boards from apps like Asana or Monday.com within meetings and channels so that you don’t have to switch back and forth between tools to get work done. Or you can quickly draw up a poll in a Teams meeting using Slido or Polly to crowdsource input and ideas in real-time: Should we approve this plan, yes or no? What are the topics for our offsite? Pick three of these five.

We’re also making it easier for departments to incorporate the apps they specifically use into their meetings experience, such as Jira and GitHub for DevOps teams, Workday and Adobe Sign for HR and Finance teams, and Service Now for customer support.

And there's growing opportunity in industry-specific scenarios. In education, we’re working with learning management system partners like Canvas, Schoology, Blackboard, and Moodle so that Teams can work seamlessly alongside multiple LMS solutions and apps, supporting online lectures, discussion, and productive collaboration as millions of students access virtual classrooms.

DevOps teams can use apps like Jira Cloud and GitHub to build, test and release software directly in Teams. HR and Finance teams can use market-leading apps like Workday and Adobe Sign to streamline common workflows. And customer service and support teams can use ServiceNow to respond to and manage support requests in Teams.

We also see tremendous potential to create tailored experiences for firstline workers using Teams on mobile devices. Each of those firstline worker scenarios is a unique opportunity—hospitals, airline maintenance, showrooms, factory floors and many others. We can’t wait to see what innovation sparks in these diverse settings.

Building industry partnerships

There’s also a significant opportunity for industry partners. Their solutions can become even more valuable when they are connected to collaborative workflows.

We recently announced Teams EHR connector, enabling healthcare providers to pull up medical records during a telehealth visit so doctors, nurses and patients can have access to the information right there. We’re pleased to have Epic on board as a launch partner and look forward to joining forces with other EHR providers.

As part of today’s announcement, we’re also offering new features in the ServiceNow Virtual Agent app for Teams as well as a pilot of Salesforce.com for sales organizations to integrate CRM cards directly into the flow of their work.

These companies could build their own chat and meeting systems to unlock the innovation in bot-based workflows. But why not build it in Teams, where we’ve addressed companies’ security, performance and compliance needs? We took care of the foundational challenges so our customers can focus on innovating on top.

That's the journey I’m so grateful to have been a part of over the past three decades. I think back to the very beginning when we asked questions like how an Excel spreadsheet could be a platform. Today we’ve brought that same mindset to the Teams ecosystem, and it’s thriving with both our customers and partners.

We will continue to deliver new and exciting features for Teams, SharePoint, Excel, and the entire Microsoft 365 suite while holding ourselves to the highest standards for performance, security, and compliance. Throughout this challenging year, businesses have invested in tech tools to bolster their resilience, which has spurred a lot of creativity on how to achieve that. As extensibility opportunities grow in Teams and Microsoft 365, we look forward to seeing how developers and partners build on top of the platform for customers around the world.

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