Windows 10: Enhancing your Microsoft Teams experience with the apps you need

Brink · Nov 16, 2020

Over the past year, the pandemic has dramatically changed the way we live and work. Organizations around the world adopted tools like Microsoft Teams to support working-from-home and hybrid work. Today, over 115 million people use Teams every day. And while video conferencing was a key driver for Teams rapid growth and adoption, our customers quickly realized the need to digitally transform beyond meetings to support a new way of work. They want to integrate apps and business processes into where work happensâto better serve customers, streamline work, and improve employee productivity and wellbeing.

Teams is designed to enable this new way of working. It is the only platform that brings together chat, meetings, calling, file collaboration, and apps you need, all in one place. You can easily customize Teams with apps to fit your specific needsâwhether thatâs adding apps from the Teams app store, or creating custom line of business apps, workflows, or bots to use in Teams.

Today, weâre announcing new Teams apps that will make your everyday work more seamless.

New apps to make your meetings more productive and engaging

While all teams need a place to communicate and collaborate to move work forward, every team does it differently. Thatâs why you can customize Teams with apps you can bring into for chat, channels, and now, meetings. We are excited to announce the availability of Teams apps for meetings along with nearly 20 new Teams apps for meetings in the Teams app store, such as Asana, HireVue, Monday.com, Slido, and Teamflect, as well as familiar Microsoft apps such as Forms. If youâre a developer, learn more about creating Teams apps for meetings.

For example, many customers use Asana in Teams chat and channels to manage projects and track tasks. Now, you can add the Asana app into your Teams meeting invite so that during a meeting, you can easily create new action items. After the meeting, everyone can see the action items in the project plan and start working through them.

Another great tool that customers can use in their meetings is Slido, With Slido, you can use to plan and conduct live polls, quizzes, and Q&As in the Teams meetings experience without having to toggle back and forth between the app and the meeting.

These new apps for meetings join the more than 700 Teams apps already available in the Teams App Store that our customers use every day. For example, DevOps teams use apps like Jira Cloud and GitHub to build, test and release software directly in Teams. HR and Finance teams use market leading apps like Workday and Adobe Sign to streamline common workflows in Teams. And customer service and support teams use ServiceNow to respond to and manage support requests in Teams.

In fact, this month the Now Virtual Agent app by ServiceNow will feature new capabilities that will help improve employee productivity with seamless self-service and faster case resolution, allowing employees to submit support requests, view open ticket approvals, take action on notifications, chat with virtual agents for automated assistance, and streamline communication between agents and employeesâall while staying in the flow of work in Teams.

Build and integrate custom apps into your digital workspace

Adding apps from the Teams App Store is just one way to customize how you work, but every organization has processes and ways of working that are unique to them, and often require custom solutions.

Teams is an extensible platform with a broad set of capabilities and entry points, so you can also easily create custom apps to fit your organizationâs needs. For example, EPIC Systems, a global healthcare software company, recently built a connector that will allow clinicians and patients to schedule and launch virtual visits in Teams from within patient and provider portals â increasing access to vital services during a challenging time.

To build these custom apps, partners and developers use our professional grade developer tools like the Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, which provide developers everything they need to jump start Teams app development. Weâve made great advancements in these toolkits since their debut at Build earlier this year and will continue doing so, ensuring developers have a frictionless experience building Teams apps. Learn how to get started with these tools.

Thousands of organizations rely on enterprise apps built on SharePoint, so weâve made significant strides in integrating Teams app development with the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), our largest and fastest growing UX extensibility model in Microsoft 365. By building Teams apps using SPFx, IT can save costs on hosting infrastructure and simplify the deployment and operation process â while SharePoint developers can expand the breadth and use of their apps using the framework they know and love. Learn how to get started building Teams apps with SPFx.

Drive agility with low code apps, workflows, and chatbots in Teams

Many of our customers are looking to digitally transform the workplace, but do not have enough developer capacity or time to build fully custom apps. For these customers, weâve brought together the Microsoft Power Platform and Teams. Microsoft Power Platform provides low code tools to build apps, workflows, and chatbots, as well as deploy and manage themâall without leaving Teams.

We are excited to announce that the new Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents apps for Teams are now generally available.

Power Apps for Teams allows users to build and manage low code apps right within Teams. With an approachable user experience, anyone can now build apps to simplify work.

Power Automate app for Teams contains a simplified workflow designer and a number of templates to help anyone get started automating routine tasks.

Power Virtual Agents app for Teams makes it easy to build and deploy bots to support a range of scenarios, like IT helpdesk, operations FAQs, and HR issue resolution.

And with Microsoft Dataverse for Teams, a low code data platform that is also generally available today, you now have what is needed to easily build and deploy apps and chatbots in Teams. Dataverse will also improve application lifecycle management and allow greater control over the data you use to build your apps, bots, and workflows in Teams.

Teams customers are using Power Platform to create low-code solutions to simplify work. For example, Lumen Technologies used Power Apps in Teams to build apps that improve HR processes and help file technicians respond to outages faster. Office Depot built Power Apps with Teams to help improve payroll management for their store associates and is building a community of apps and workflows to further improve business processes and keep employees in the flow of work.

And of course, as these apps and custom solutions are being built and published, IT admins have robust controls to ensure the security and compliance of their company data. Learn more on how you can manage Teams apps across your tenant.

Transform your workspace with Teams

As you can see, Teams makes it easy to customize your workspace â whether thatâs adding SaaS apps from the Teams app store, or creating custom apps, workflows, or bots to use in Teams.

We are humbled by the fact that Teams is used by millions of people around the world every day. Teams enables a new way of work, and our Teams apps integrations make work even easier.

Learn more on how you can transform your workspace with Teams apps. For additional information on the information shared above, please visit:

Microsoft Tech CommunityâTeams blog: Building and managing amazing Teams apps.

Microsoft Tech CommunityâTeams blog: New Apps for Teams â Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents.

Microsoft Tech CommunityâTeams blog: Start automating processes with the New Power Automate app for Teams.

Power Apps Blog: Microsoft Dataverse for Teams is now generally available.

Power Automate Blog: Easily create and manage flows with the new Power Automate App for Teams.

Webinars on November 17, 2020: Drive Better Meetings Experiences with Apps for Microsoft Teams.

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Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/micr...apps-you-need/

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Brink · Nov 16, 2020

Microsoft Lists in Microsoft Teams is now generally available

Today, we are proud to announce the general availability of the Lists app in Teams for all our commercial and GCC customers. As you might already know, Microsoft Lists, which we announced at Build 2020 is a Microsoft 365 app that helps you track information and organize your work. Lists are simple, smart, and flexible, so you can stay on top of what matters most to your team. Track patients, loans, issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory and more using customizable views and smart rules and alerts to keep everyone in sync. With ready-made templates, you can quickly create lists from directly within Teams and access them on the Teams mobile app by accessing the Lists tab you added as a channel.

Introducing the Lists app in Teams

The vision of the Lists app in Teams is to bring all the collaboration and communication modalities to lists and list items, so it is easy to get work done.

The new Lists app experience in Microsoft Teams, for mobile on the left and for Web and desktop on the right.

Lists in Teams is supported as a team based tab app built on top of the Microsoft Teams platform and supports the following features:

New list creation from scratch, from templates (8 standard templates and 3 industry specific ones: Patients, Loans, and Incidents), from Excel table data and from an existing list.

Importing existing team lists as new tabs.

All standard list features that you can access in SharePoint web: column types, view formatting, Quick Edit, exporting to Excel, sorting, filtering, etc.

The ability to have a channel conversation about a list item (see below for more details).

All user actions on the list are audited and available in the Security and compliance center audit logging.

How do I get started?

To get started, simply go to any channel where you would like to start tracking a list and hit the “+” button to explore the tab gallery and select the Lists app. Once the tab is added you can either create a new list or bring in an existing list (from another team or an older SharePoint site, but not a personal list from Lists home) into the channel as a new tab.

Create a new list inside Teams with conversations side-by-side. The above shows using the Asset manager template.

The Lists app in Teams includes 3 new industry-specific templates – Patients, Loans and Incidents. Team members start managing and tracking these key entities. Here are some examples of how these templates can be leveraged.

Create a new list from within Microsoft Teams and choose from numerous ready-made templates, including the new industry-specific ones.

Healthcare organizations can use the Lists app in Teams to support patient rounding, multi-discplinary huddles and discharge planning. The Patients template is an easy way for all health teams to track patient progress and keep in touch with their peers. If you have questions about storage of PHI in Teams, Lists, or Office 365, please see more documentation here.

Government agencies can use the Lists app in Teams to track incidents and coordinated incident response. The Incidents template helps people quickly setup a list and get started.

Loan officers at a morgtage broker or bank can use the Lists app to track a set of loans and informally collaborate on advancing a them to approval. The Loans template helps them get started with plenty of scope for further customization.

How do I start a conversation alongside a list item?

Once you have configured the tab and have a list with list items, you can start a conversation about an individual list item. Go to the details view (or form) for the list item by clicking into the title field and then click on conversation to start a conversation about the list item on the channel. With this feature, you can collaborate with your team about the list item (your key business entities) and get work done, faster.

Since the conversation is a channel message in Teams, all the messaging features like @mentions, rich text, giphies, stickers, emojis, mentions, tagging, and attachments are available for use! The conversation shows up in the right rail for the list item and also on the channel for those who might not have viewed the list as yet.

You can chat side-by-side individual list items within Teams.

See more about getting started with the Lists app in Teams “Create a list in Microsoft Teams” click-thru demo. And do not forget to try the Lists app experience in the Teams mobile app to track your lists within Teams on the go. Just go to your Teams android or iOS mobile apps and go to the channel where you have added the Lists app and click on more and tap on the tab name to open up the list.

Learn more about the Lists app in Teams

If you are unable to see the Lists app in your channel, please contact your Teams Admin because applications in the Teams app store can be disabled or enabled by app permission policies. For more information, see the Manage the Lists app in Teams article. If you are looking for more resources and guidance, please review the help article here. For general help content and resources on Microsoft Lists, check out the Microsoft Lists resource center.

Note: Users of the existing SharePoint tab app in Teams that have pinned a list will see their experience inside the tab get upgraded to the latest Lists in Teams experience. This change will be rolling out today as well.

Millions of people use SharePoint lists and libraries every month in Microsoft 365 to track issues, manage inventory, report status, onboard new hires, build out event agendas, manage FAQs, and more. With flexible columns, forms, and views, you can build your own solution to meet your specific needs without knowing how to code. All these great capabilities now come to you inside the Lists app in Teams.

As always, thanks for taking the time to read about Lists in Teams! We’d love to hear any feedback or ideas you might have. Do submit suggestions on user voice. We are listening!
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Source: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/...e/ba-p/1621979

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Brink · Nov 16, 2020

New Meeting and Calling Experience in Microsoft Teams

You may have seen the recent announcement of new meeting features in Teams in Reimagining virtual collaboration for the future of work and learning (if not, check it out!). Today, we’re pleased to share that we’re making several of these features available to most users of Teams over the next few days.

We’re gradually rolling the features out. Once you’ve got the build that has the new experience (Teams desktop app only), you’ll have the option to turn it on. Read on to learn how to turn it on, what comes with it, how to use it, and answers to some common questions. Let’s get right to it!

Turn on the new experience

You do this via a checkbox in Teams Settings. Here’s how:

Select your profile pic at the top of the Teams app, then Settings > General. (General should be what’s showing when you open Settings, so you probably won’t have to select it.)

Select Turn on new meeting experience.

Restart Teams by doing the following:

a. Right-click or Cmd-click the Teams icon in the Windows task bar or Mac System Tray.
b. Select Quit.
c. Start Teams again like you normally would.
You might also see a notification that announces the new experience or reminds you to turn it on. Then it’s even easier—in that notification, choose Turn it on now if you’re ready at that point, or Maybe later if you’re in the middle of something.

What happens after you’ve turned it on

After turning on the new experience and restarting Teams, the biggest thing you’ll probably notice is that any calls and meetings will pop out into their own window, separate from the main Teams window. Like this:

If you’re still seeing calls and meetings in the main Teams window after turning the setting on and restarting, go to your profile pic again and select Check for updates. Once that is done, do the same quit and restart procedure per above. That should do the trick.

But wait, there’s more

Here are the other new things you’ll see and can try out:

Meeting controls are moved to the top of the meeting screen. They’re docked there so you always have access to them (without jiggling your mouse) and they’re out of the way of the content and video that’s being shared.

Large gallery view lets you see up to 49 video streams at once. This view is available when there are 10 or more attendees who are sharing video. To switch to large gallery, go to More options (…) in the meeting controls > Large gallery.

Here’s what it looks like—pretty cool to see all those faces!

Together mode lets you feel like you’re in the same shared space with everyone in the meeting. (It might be even more fun than Large gallery.) It’s in the same menu as Large gallery, just below it. Here’s Together mode:

Together mode is available when 5 or more participants are sharing video.

Both Large gallery and Together mode are being rolled out gradually over the next few weeks. If you don’t see them right away, check again later.

Meeting notes are now taken directly on the meeting’s Meeting notes tab in the main Teams window. (This is one of the benefits of having the meeting in a separate window.) To access or take notes from within the meeting window, select More options (…) > Show meeting notes and you’ll see the usual side pane come up. In the pane, there is a Take notes button that brings you to the Meeting notes tab.

Focus mode is available when content is being shared. If you’d like to pay close attention to content, without the distraction of seeing video feeds, Focus mode is for you. It’s available in the meeting controls under More options (…) > Focus mode. Give it a whirl!

Common questions

Has screen sharing changed? How do I share my screen?

No big changes here. In the meeting controls at the top, select Share screen. The screen choices you have will come up from the bottom of the meeting window just like they did before.

To stop sharing your screen, select Close screen share in the meeting controls. It’s the icon next to the Leave button.

Why are message extensions grayed out? I like to send polls in meeting chat.

We’re working on it! For now, if you want to send a poll or use other message extensions in the meeting chat, go back to the main Teams window, select the meeting chat (either via the Calendar or the list in Chat), and do it there.

What about InVision Freehand whiteboard?

Yup, we’re working on that, too.

Will live events also open in their own window?

No, not yet—that functionality is coming soon.

Focus mode is nice, but what about Full screen view?

We like Full screen view, too! (It’s available currently in meetings that happen in the main Teams window.) We’re working on bringing that to the new experience as well. When we do, you’ll have both Focus mode and Full screen view to choose from.

Is this available for any license type?

The new experience isn’t available for Teams for Government or Teams free just yet. But soon.

Which platforms?

The new meeting and calling experience is available for the Teams desktop client on both Windows and Mac. It’s not available for Teams on the web. (If you need to download the desktop client, go here.)

What if I don’t turn the new experience on?

We’d love for you to try it out. We’re making it available in this way partly because in the near future, we’ll turn the experience on by default. Eventually, the setting to turn it on and off will go away. At that time, the experience of meetings in separate windows, with the meeting controls at the top, will become the norm. So we want you to have ample time to get familiar with it.
That’s our overview and how-to for this new meeting and calling experience. We hope you’ll try it. Remember to check for updates and restart the Teams client after you turn it on. Enjoy!
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Source: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/...s/ba-p/1537581

Brink · Nov 16, 2020

Microsoft Teams PWA preview available for Windows 10 S devices

Today at Build 2018, Microsoft Teams is announcing a range of new capabilities and integrations to build and manage tailored apps for your enterprise using the Teams developer platform. Extending the power of Office 365 and Microsoft Graph APIs, IT professionals can create, curate, and distribute an enterprise catalog of apps for Teams while automating team and channel management to fit your organization. Tailoring your teamwork is now even easier through new integrations and shared developer capabilities experiences with other Office 365 applications, including SharePoint and Outlook.

Build will continue the momentum developed in late March 2018 during Enterprise Connect, where Microsoft Teams celebrated its one-year anniversary and shared that over 200K organizations are using the platform. We also announced new capabilities coming to Teams later this year such as Cloud recording, Inline message translation, Background blur on video in meetings, Proximity detection for Teams meetings, Mobile sharing in meetings, and Cortana voice interactions for Teams-enabled devices, all supporting our vision for Intelligent Communications (check out the most recent updates for May)

At Build we are excited to announce the preview of the Teams app for the Microsoft Store. This release marks an important step in our ongoing efforts to support Progressive Web App (PWA) capabilities in Windows, using Edge based rendering and combining web technologies with native OS capabilities to deliver an innovative new experience. As a Store app, it is installed and managed through the Microsoft Store, supports the Narrator screen reader, and integrates with the Windows 10 Action Center. For Public Preview, the Teams Store app is only available for Windows 10 S / S-mode devices.

We continue to add new capabilities on a regular basis to make Teams an even more powerful hub for teamwork. For customers pushing the boundary of teamwork and mixed reality , learn more about the Microsoft Remote Assist announcement from earlier today at Build.

This week at the conference, we’ll be focusing on opportunities in four areas to “do more” with tailored Teams apps:

Get Started – Today you can use tabs to bring content into conversations, check out the following features that provide you more control over your content

Apps in Chat—coming soon to developer Preview, you can now update your app so that it can be used in private 1:1 and group chats. Your users can add a tab or chat with a bot in their private chats to light up new collaboration and sharing scenarios.

SharePoint pages in Teams—SharePoint is now even more deeply integrated into Teams—with the latest integration you can pin a SharePoint page in your channels to enable deeper collaboration around sites and other SharePoint content, and get the full power of the SharePoint app platform within Teams.

Teams App Studio – debuted in January in preview, Teams App Studio streamlines and automates the development process for creating Microsoft Teams apps by helping you to define your app’s manifest through simple forms, In the next few months Teams App Studio will be able to save your app manifest in the cloud and provide in-app registration with Microsoft Bot Framework.

Enhance Conversations – Today you can use Azure bot services for natural language interaction and provide structured commands through messaging extensions, check out these new features to enhance conversations

Adaptive card support—coming soon to developer Preview, you can now send rich Adaptive cards from your bot, connector, or messaging extension. Adaptive cards allow you to send more flexible content in conversations and are supported on other Microsoft platforms such as Outlook, Windows, and Cortana.

Files support for bots—coming soon to developer Preview, your bot can now send and receive files in 1:1 chats with users. Enable content and document scenarios such as expense reports, file management, and image processing.

Distribute and manage your teams and apps – Make your apps available to users with the right controls. Check out the following new features to customize your teams within the enterprise

Tailored Teams created through the New Teams APIs in Microsoft Graph—use enhanced Microsoft Graph APIs to programmatically manage Teams resources and content including teams, channels, and conversations. We will be releasing the following APIs from preview to General Availability this summer: creating and deleting teams and channels; adding and remove team members and owners; and updating team and channel properties.

Enterprise app sharing through Teams enterprise catalog for apps - control access to custom Teams apps and distribute apps to users within the organizations by publishing to your company’s catalog in the Teams app store. Manage the catalog via PowerShell cmdlets, Graph APIs, and even through the Teams client itself.

Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower left corner of Microsoft Teams. If you have suggestions on how to make Teams better, please submit your idea via User Voice or vote for existing ideas to help us prioritize the requests. We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make sure that Microsoft Teams meets your needs.
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Source: Build and manage tailored apps for the enterprise using the Teams developer platform - Microsoft Tech Community - 190580

Download: Microsoft Teams app| Microsoft Store

Windows 10: Enhancing your Microsoft Teams experience with the apps you need

Enhancing your Microsoft Teams experience with the apps you need

Enhancing your Microsoft Teams experience with the apps you need

Enhancing your Microsoft Teams experience with the apps you need

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