Build 2017: Microsoft announces new Teams collaboration features

Microsoft at its annual Build 2017 conference announced some new updates for its Teams enterprise collaboration developer platform. The same would enable developers to bring new features to Teams in the future. Thanks to the new features, developers will now be able to deliver their apps for Teams using the Office Store. These Teams apps will appear in a new “discover apps experience” section that should give them more visibility. There is now a new “compose extensions” in the preview that will let users add commands to draw information from integrated apps and service in the chat. Lastly, there is now also support for third-party notifications in Microsoft Teams. The Teams activity feed will let developers build features into apps that will alert users of important information right withing the feeds. Indeed, this Microsoft’s response to Slack. Unlike Slack, Microsoft has its own ecosystem of Office apps, which means they will be better integrated into Teams. This would include a wide range of Microsoft applications like Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and more.  Add to this an additional  150 odd integrations with third-party service from the corporate space and Microsoft may finally have a winner this year. But let’s just wait for it to all fall into place.