Microsoft Primes Partners to Build Next Wave of Teams Collaborative Apps
… collaboration capabilities to meeting apps including whiteboarding, design and project boards.
This summer, Microsoft will enable applications to surface real-time access to meeting audio and video with new media APIs. This will enable real-time access to audio and video streams to add services such as transcription and translation, among others.
Microsoft is enhancing Together Mode, a feature launched last year, which replaces the gallery with a background such as an auditorium or a meeting room. Microsoft is now making Together Mode more extensible.
A new scene designer tool in the developer portal lets programmers, or even end users, create their own scenes.
“Using this is as simple as dragging an image configuring the number of participants and their position,” Saseetharan said. “You can even assign role-based seating to the participants and grab the link and share it with anyone. Or you can publish the scene broadly in the team store as well.”
Azure Communications Services Previews
Microsoft is also building on the integration of Azure Communications Services (ACS) with Teams announced in March. ACS will let developers build Teams communications functions into custom apps or websites. With ACS, VoIP and chat usage will be billed to Azure resources when using the APIs and SDKs.
During a session at this week’s Build event, Microsoft demonstrated how to build applications across meetings, chat and channels within our outside Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft also released previews of new ACS features. Among them include the new UI Library for ACS designed to let developers more rapidly build cross-channel experiences. The UI component consists of React JavaScript libraries designed to build interactive interfaces and Microsoft’s Fluid cross-platform design platform.
Microsoft designed Fluid components to let end-users create live, collaborative components such as lists, tables and tasks, Teper said. Users can share them across Teams with other Office apps such as Outlook. Fluid components will let people share ideas. They also allow them to reduce the number of meetings they hold and minimize long chat threads, Teper said.
“Collaborative apps enabled by Teams and end-user experiences like Fluid components will help people in your organizations quickly align across teams and get work done efficiently,” Teper said.
Futurum Research analyst Daniel Newman believes the new features will provide a “material knock-on effect” on the success of Teams.
“While I believe there is still room for improvement in the Teams user experience, there is very little debate on its rampant growth within the enterprise,” according to Newman’s analysis. “The competition in the collaboration space will remain fierce, with Zoom, Cisco, and Microsoft leading the pack and pushing innovation to make work more productive and more enjoyable for the masses.”
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