Building apps for Teams, Outlook and Office with yo teams
YoTeams

Building apps for Teams, Outlook and Office with yo teams

Today at //Build we at Microsoft announced that the long awaited support for Collaborative apps in Teams Personal Tabs and Messaging Extensions now is available for usage in Office.com, Outlook and Outlook on the web. This update to Teams apps is based on the new Promise based Teams JS SDK version 2.0 and the just published Teams Manifest 1.13. Announcing Yo Teams version 4 Through the Microsoft 365 Platform Community (PnP) we have also released a brand new (preview) version of yo teams that supports both this new Teams JS SDK as well as the updated schema.

Happy 5th anniversary Yo Teams!
YoTeams

Happy 5th anniversary Yo Teams!

Five years! It’s been five years seen I first published the Microsoft Teams apps generator - yo teams, and in a few days we also have the 5th anniversary for the official Microsoft Teams launch. It’s been five very interesting years that has changed how we collaborate and communicate. It all started long before March of 2017. I had the opportunity to work for an organization that was one of the early adopters of Microsoft Teams, and driven by my curiosity I immediately saw that with this new tool had some amazing opportunities to create even better experiences for my customers.

Create a Collaborative App for Microsoft 365, that runs across Teams, Outlook and Office.com
Microsoft Teams

Create a Collaborative App for Microsoft 365, that runs across Teams, Outlook and Office.com

We’re getting closer to the holidays and we all like to both give and receive gifts at this time of the year. Here is an early Christmas gift from me, and the amazing Microsoft teams that’s been building out these new features, to all of you fantastic people out there. A few months ago Microsoft announced the capabilities where we can deploy Microsoft Teams apps and use them across other high-usage areas of Microsoft 365 and now those areas has been extended even further and covers Office.

Simple Teams Tab Single-Sign-On with Microsoft Graph
YoTeams

Simple Teams Tab Single-Sign-On with Microsoft Graph

When building applications for Microsoft Teams, the very first hurdle essentially all developers will try to jump over is the one with getting an access token to be able to communicate with Microsoft Graph. This is something that can be done fairly easy, if you know what to do, but requires you as a developer to connect a few dots. Over the last year this has become way easier, and there are a few great examples out there - you can find some great ones in the PnP Teams Samples.

Inside the Viva Connections desktop app, or BYO Viva app
Microsoft Viva

Inside the Viva Connections desktop app, or BYO Viva app

Yesterday Microsoft released the anticipated set of scripts required for you to add the Microsoft Viva Connections app to your Microsoft Teams environment. It’s a very simple approach that only requires you to download a PowerShell script, install the latest Microsoft SharePoint Online PowerShell module and then answer a set of questions, and voila you have the Viva Connections Desktop app ready for installation in Microsoft Teams. Note: as the time of writing this and testing the PowerShell script, I was not able to download the required SharePoint Online PowerShell module and received an error while running the script.

Team development for Microsoft Teams apps
Microsoft Teams

Team development for Microsoft Teams apps

When building software the most common scenario is that you have a team building the solution, application and/or service. You typically have front-end, back-end and full-stack developers, you have testers and designers, and more. However, working in a team is not always easy. Back in the days we could all have our software running locally and we just grabbed the latest version/commit and hacked away. For web applications the use of localhost worked just fine for almost everyone.

YoTeams

Microsoft Teams Tabs SSO and Microsoft Graph - the 'on-behalf-of' blog post

Hey, I’m back. Long time since I did some writing on this blog. But I needed to get this one out. As you all know I’m a huge fan of the Microsoft Teams extensibility model and now with the SSO support for Tabs, it’s even easier to create integrated experiences for your end users where they can consume data and information from the Microsoft Graph or LOB systems. I recently did a small appearance at the Microsoft 365 PnP webcast showcasing how to configure and scaffold a Microsoft Teams project that uses this new SSO Tab feature.

Microsoft Teams

Version 2.7.0 of the Microsoft Teams Apps generator is now available

Happy Easter everyone, I have fantastic news. After seven preview versions (and even a skipped version - 2.6) the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator 2.7.0 is now available for you to use! Just like tons of others do; there’s been over 6.000 downloads of the generator, it’s generating a handful of new Teams projects every day and it’s done from all parts of the world! Join the movement! As usual it is just a simple npm command to install:

Microsoft Teams

Creating a Bot for Microsoft Teams using Microsoft Flow

Imagine you want to create a chat bot for Microsoft Teams in order to automate tasks, enhance the discussion or just feeling lonely and want someone to talk to. There’s many ways of doing this; you can start from scratch building a bot, using the Microsoft Bot framework and/or using the Microsoft Teams Yeoman generator, you can use the Azure Bot Service, you can use the FAQ bots to essentially create a no code solution.

Microsoft Teams

Announcing Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator 2.5.0

A long overdue update of the Microsoft Teams Apps Yeoman generator – we’re now up to version 2.5.0! It’s a fairly substantial update both in the generator and in the generated code – this update will make future updates a lot smoother and will allow for enabling more features going forward. Thanks to all who provided feedback and input and has tested the generator over the last few months.

Bot Framework

Using Device Codes to authenticate Bots with Azure AD

I’ve been building chat-bots for a while now and I’m seeing more and more requests of building these bots for enterprises. For bots targeted at the enterprise, perhaps being hosted in Microsoft Teams, one of the first requirements is that they should get data from their internal systems and most specifically from Office 365, through the Microsoft Graph. The problem here is that we need to authenticate and authorize the user, through Microsoft Azure AD, to be able to access these resources.

Microsoft Teams

yo teams have a new home, and officially backed by Microsoft

A couple of months back I started creating a Yeoman generator to make it easier for me to scaffold, build and deploy the Microsoft Teams extensions (now apps). I’ve received very good feedback on it and had some very nice contributions to the project, which was hosted on my public Github account. To really make this available for everyone to use I’ve been discussing this project with the Microsoft Teams team about having it “officially backed” by the real team and nut just me as an individual.

Microsoft Teams

yo teams: a full Microsoft Teams extensibility Yeoman generator

A couple of weeks back I published a Yeoman generator to build Tabs for Microsoft Teams. Since then I’ve continued to add stuff to it as the Teams team has continued to add features to their extensibility story. So, this generator is not only for creating Tabs, but now also for adding Bots and Custom Bots to Microsoft Teams. With that I decided to rename the generator to yo teams (generator name is generator-teams).

Microsoft Teams

Congratulations to the Microsoft Teams team on an excellent delivery

A big round of applause for Microsoft and the team behind Microsoft Teams for now being general available (GA) worldwide. Today, they lit up the Teams icon in the Office 365 waffle for all tenants (unless your admins are being boring and has turned it off). It’s been awesome to be a part of this preview journey, which started last summer. Avanade was selected as one of the TAP members, in a preview program shrouded in a secrecy I’ve not seen at Microsoft before.

Microsoft Teams

yo teams-tab: A Microsoft Teams Tabs Yeoman generator

I’m happy to announce that today at SharePoint Saturday Munich I presented a new Yeoman generator for building Microsoft Teams Tabs projects. Tabs in Microsoft Teams is a great way to extend the user interface and to do integrations to other systems and provide visualizations. Tabs are based on a JavaScript framework, a set of web pages and a manifest describing the Tab. It requires a set of manual steps to both build out the pages, configuring CSS, hooking up the JavaScripts, deploying it all to a web site hosted in the cloud, writing the manifest, packaging the manifest into a zip file and more.