Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

At its (virtual) Build conference today, Microsoft launched a number of new features, tools and services for developers who want to integrate their services with Teams, the company’s Slack competitor. It’s no secret that Microsoft basically looks at Teams, which now has about 145 million daily active users, as the new hub for employees to get work done, so it’s no surprise that it wants third-party developers to bring their services right to Teams as well. And to do so, it’s now offering a set of new tools that will make this easier and enable developers to build new user experiences in Teams.

There’s a lot going on here, but maybe the most important news is the launch of the enhanced Microsoft Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

“This essentially enables developers to build apps easier and faster — and to build very powerful apps tapping into the rich Microsoft stack,” Microsoft group program manager Archana Saseetharan explained. “With the updated toolkit […], we enable flexibility for developers. We want to meet developers where they are.”

Image Credits: Microsoft

The toolkit offers support for tools and frameworks like React, SharePoint and .NET. Some of the updates the team enabled with this release are integration with Aure Functions, the SharePoint Framework integration and a single-line integration with the Microsoft Graph. Microsoft is also making it easier for developers to integrate an authorization workflow into their Teams apps. “Login is the first kind of experience of any user with an app — and most of the drop-offs happen there,” Saseetharan said. “So [single-sign on] is something we completely are pushing hard on.”

The team also launched a new Developer Portal for Microsoft Teams that makes it easier for developers to register and configure their apps from a single tool. ISVs will also be able to use the new portal to offer their apps for in-Teams purchases.

Other new Teams features for developers include ways for developers to build real-time multi-user experiences like whiteboards and project boards, for example, as well as a new meeting event API to build meeting-related workflows for when a meeting starts and ends, for example, as well as new features for the Teams Together mode that will let developers design their own Together experiences.

There are a few other new features here as well, but what it all comes down to is that Microsoft wants developers to consider Teams as a viable platform for their services — and with 145 million daily active users, that’s potentially a lucrative way for software firms to get their services in front of a new audience.

“Teams is enabling a new class of apps called collaborative apps,” said Karan Nigam, Microsoft’s director of product marketing for Teams. “We are uniquely positioned to bring the richness to the collaboration space — a ton of innovation to the extensibility side to make apps richer, making it easier with the toolkit update, and then have a single-stop shop with the developer portal where the entire lifecycle can be managed. Ultimately, for a developer, they don’t have to go to multiple places, it’s one single flow from the business perspective for them as well.”

Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub closed last October. Today, at its annual Build developer conference, Microsoft announced a number of new integrations between its existing services and GitHub. None of these are earth-shattering or change the nature of any of GitHub’s fundamental features, but they do show how Microsoft is starting to bring GitHub closer into the fold.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft isn’t announcing any major GitHub features at Build, though it was only a few weeks ago that the company made a major change by giving GitHub Free users access to unlimited private repositories. For major feature releases, GitHub has its own conference.

So what are the new integrations? Most of them center around identity management. That means GitHub Enterprise users can now use Azure Active Directory to access GitHub. Developers will also be able to use their existing GitHub accounts to log into Azure features like the Azure Portal and Azure DevOps. “This update enables GitHub developers to go from repository to deployment with just their GitHub account,” Microsoft argues in its release announcement.

As far as selling GitHub goes, Microsoft also today announced a new Visual Studio subscription with access to GitHub Enterprise for Microsoft’s Enterprise Agreement customers. Given that there is surely a lot of overlap between Visual Studio’s enterprise customers and GitHub Enterprise users, this move makes sense. Chances are, it’ll also make moving to GitHub Enterprise more enticing for current Visual Studio subscribers.

Lastly, the Azure Boards app, which offers features like Kanban boards and sprint planning tools, is now also available in the GitHub Marketplace.

 Microsoft today announced that Visual Studio 2015 (VS 2015), the latest version of the company’s integrated development environment, will launch on July 20.
This latest version greatly emphasizes cross-platform development, with support for targeting Windows, iOS and Android, in part through its support for the Apache Cordova project and Xamarin’s app development platform. Read More