In the last 20 months, we've seen an explosion in virtual connections, with individuals interacting more often and across more apps than ever before—both inside and outside their enterprises.
The challenge today is how can we get from simply coping to flourishing in hybrid work.
The capacity to bring people, processes, and insights together to unleash seamless and secure collaboration and accelerate creativity and learning right in the flow of work, we think, is the answer.
Teams has become the new method for people to connect, communicate, and remain in the flow of work with complete context, with 250 million monthly active users. Monthly usage of third-party apps and custom-built solutions within Teams has increased nearly tenfold since the start of 2020, while the number of apps launched by developers, partners, and customers for Teams has doubled in the last year.
Let's look at how Teams expands its fundamental collaboration capabilities to make your apps and processes more fluid and efficient.
Using Dynamics 365 and Teams, you can expand your cooperation.
Let's start with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Teams connections, which are a best-in-class example of a collaborative tool that helps you connect with the relevant people and data in one location.
Today, we're announcing new Dynamics 365 and Teams experiences that deliver additional data and connection straight into your workflow.
For example, you'll be able to interact with your team and search for a Dynamics 365 Sales customer record all from within Teams, eliminating the need to switch applications. Then deliver the record as a Loop component, which streamlines processes across Teams and Office apps while also providing a powerful and versatile canvas that can be modified and shared in real time. You may then embed the dialogue in the Dynamics 365 record after you're finished. Between now until the end of 2022, these features will be accessible in public preview.
This isn't limited to Teams—you can start Teams conversations or make calls straight from Dynamics 365, providing you the freedom to work together in real time with essential information at your fingertips, or asynchronously at your own speed.
Bring important data and workflows into Teams from other apps.
We're looking forward to seeing software suppliers such as SAP, Salesforce, Adobe, Workday, and Atlassian integrate their data and app processes into Microsoft Teams in order to engage more people directly in the flow of work and deepen their use of their solutions.
SAP Sales and Service Core in Teams, for example, simplifies hybrid sales processes and allows you to maintain your attention where it belongs: on customers. Without switching programs, you may schedule meetings in Teams from SAP. Relevant information and context may be displayed directly in Teams when speaking with customers. In real-time, all context, including meeting recordings and notes, will be synchronized back to SAP Sales Cloud.
Custom application development using the Power Platform can help you solve challenges.
As more businesses across the world embrace digital transformation, business executives are frequently confronted with a lack of resources to develop the specific solutions and procedures necessary for hybrid work. That's why we want to provide everyone the ability to create line-of-business apps in Teams using the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio, as well as low-code and no-code solutions using the Microsoft Power Platform. Today, we're enhancing the connectors between Power Platform and Teams to help you quickly build a variety of apps to meet your organization's evolving needs.
Using Power Apps, app makers will soon be able to integrate Teams chat experiences into their unique business apps. This integration with Power Apps will allow you to integrate the collaborative experience your customers are used to into your own line of business apps in the coming months.
Microsoft Power Virtual Agents now have new features that allow you to build more complex chatbots that can proactively contact users depending on pre-set circumstances or responses, as well as support group interactions in channel discussions. Learn more about the capabilities of Power Virtual Agents.
With additional ways to interact and new capabilities to help you construct a more data-driven workplace, the Microsoft Power BI app for Teams is now broadly available. More information about the Power BI app may be found here.
Marks and Spencer, a British retailer, utilized Power Apps to design a workplace booking software to enable employees reserve desk spaces and ensure social distance criteria were satisfied, allowing for a safe return to work for office-based employees. In order to speed help desk queries, the business also developed a Help Portal application.
"Based on the decrease in call time alone, the Help Portal app we built with Power Apps and incorporated in Teams will save between half a million and a million pounds."
—Andrew Redman, Marks & Spencer's Head of Technology, Colleague Experience and Retail Platforms
Meanwhile, United Airlines, which is working to improve its key operational procedures, chose Teams to develop and execute its Uchat and United Bot, which will help the airline's operations staff and flight crews communicate more effectively. United's frontline personnel can provide better customer service for United passengers while enhancing efficiency and safety with Teams and their applications.
Other apps can benefit from the collaborative features of Teams.
With the integration of communications services like chat and telephony, we're also allowing developers to build meaningful experiences in their apps. We've coupled the power of Teams with Microsoft Azure Communication Services (ACS) to let you re-imagine how your organization interacts using voice, video, chat, and screen sharing on any device. You may construct a bespoke external web site using ACS and Teams interoperability while your workers operate in the familiar Teams environment. On December 1, 2021, teams' interoperability with ACS will be generally accessible.
Teams App Store has been redesigned.
We're making big changes to the Teams App Store, which now has over 1,000 apps accessible. The app store will now provide personalized suggestions and highlight apps depending on your tastes, thanks to an improved landing page.
The app categories have been modified to make it simpler to locate the apps you're looking for. IT admins may now purchase third-party app subscriptions through invoice invoicing from the Teams admin center, from both within and outside your business, to assist expedite purchases. Later this month, the new Teams Store will open for business.
