The latest member of the Office 365 Suite reached General Availability (GA) today. Teams, the chat-based workspace in Office 365, is a terrific collaboration tool for organizations of any size. You can see all the details in the official announcement blog post. The adoption numbers are quite breathtaking.
From a developer perspective, there are a few extensibility options:
- Tabs
- Bots
- Connectors
Tabs
Tabs provide a canvas for your application/service inside the Teams application. Behind the scenes, this is an IFrame that hosts your HTML, with an API to get user context and facilitate authentication. The Office Dev Center has a page on Getting started with tabs for Microsoft Teams.
New in the GA release is a Wiki tab - lightweight notes with social interaction (@ mentions).
Bots
Bots allow your customers to interact with your service through conversations in Microsoft Teams. These conversations can be as simple as capturing inbound requests and starting workflows or as complex as natural language interaction with users. The Dev Center page on Getting Started with Bots for Microsoft Teams has more information.
Connectors
My favorite extensions so far are Connectors. Connectors provide notifications to Teams by initiating a conversation. Some groups will prefer notifications in this workspace instead of their inbox, and Connectors are one way to accomplish this. Connectors build upon the webhook paradigm, so they should be familiar to many developers. Again, the Dev Center has a page on Getting started with Office 365 Connectors for Microsoft Teams.