Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Teams, 9 Jul 2020

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From YouTube: Introduction to Microsoft Teams App Templates - Reference solutions to kick-start your development

Description

In this 15-minute Maker focused demo, Kiran Thomas introduces viewers to Microsoft Teams App Templates (PnP Samples) – Low-code/No-code out-of-box plug-and-play apps that can be configured and extended. Three of the 26 available templates are highlighted: Company Communicator, FAQ Plus, and Icebreaker. Quick look at the Teams App Templates Catalog/Documentation. This PnP Community demo is taken from the General Microsoft 365 Development Special Interest Group (SIG) - Bi-weekly sync call recorded on July 9, 2020.

Demo Presenter(s): Kiran Thomas (Microsoft) | @notkiran

Supporting materials:
• App Templates for Microsoft Teams | www.aka.ms/teamsapptemplates
Learn more:
• Learn more about the SharePoint developer community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the SharePoint PnP Developer Community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/spdev-videos

A

I'm Karen Thomas I'm, a product manager at teams, so I'll be talking about Microsoft teams, app templates. What they're give you a little overview talk about a few more things about Microsoft platform and we'll I'll. Also take you to the catalog overview page and walk you through it. Yeah, let's jump right in so the first thing I'd wanted to kind of go over is a little bit about the the you know: Microsoft teams, platform and, quite so important in thinking about how the platform works before we dive into app templates and go into details.

A

So you know we're using teams. Now it's pretty obvious what the core scenarios are, but the in a lot of functionality that you already use are built. You know using the extensibility of the platform. So when you want to engage with your users, you want to involve your services, but the where your users are collaborating and chatting that's. When you start thinking about using the Microsoft team's platform and what does that mean? You're, probably already using a lot of the Microsoft applications there. They are like flagship uses of the platform and that Microsoft has build.

A

We have a lot of partners that have been built on the port form. My favorite one is Polly that I used to take polls, and things like that.

A

So these are in a great examples of how the platform gets used really well, but that's when we can then move on to thinking about custom apps and how you can bring in your own scenarios from your own organizations and expand the options so think of HR team sales teams, how they can collaborate better, how you can bring data so that they don't have to switch back between using teams and other applications that they have to use every day. You can think of it by industry, whatever industry you're in.

A

How can you make a particular process in your industry easier because using all the folks who are using teams and their and as you think about that you're, you come up with your ideas of what it might be, an application that's already existing or it might be a new application that you're trying to come up with. So, there's a a key set of interfaces that teams the teams, platform offers and I'll quickly walk through each of them.

A

Tabs are probably the most complex, but also the most powerful, because they're in an open web interface that you can attach to your teams, there's bots, which are great for like conversational situations, where you want to have a one-on-one conversation between a service and a person or a group of people. There are adaptive cards which are dynamic, templatized content that can be presented, a user from your service, and it can then I mix up date and take quick actions from the user.

A

There are messaging extension which live within the context of when you compose a new message or when you're reading an existing message, you can bring your service in a small UI and make do quick actions there. There are task modules which are pop ups that allow you to connect your service through a pre-existing schema.

A

Finally, there's also notifications. This is where you can reach your users and bring your service to team's users and get them to notify whenever something changes in your service, and when you combine this with any of the backend services that microsoft offers, you can you know, kind of mix and match and bring all this together in the team.

A

So you can kind of think of when you put the interfaces in the backend between your app and service and teams, you get the end-to-end scenario were all living within teams, so this kind of architecture is already existing within the different apps in teams and just want to quickly go through a different way of thinking of each of the types of apps and teams, so the obvious ones are. We have over 45 Microsoft built apps.

A

These are tightly integrated productivity tools like the common ones like Word Excel, so this is probably the most used ones, but the folks in your organization- and there are third-party apps over 450 available in the stores. This is directly you can install it from the store ready to use, but then the you know the crazy potential comes in when you think about building your own custom, apps and adding them to teams, and that's where there's a lot of options and a lot of possibilities. So there's you can build using the power platform.

A

We have an integration on the power platform that allows you to use loco no code, there's the app templates, which is what we're going to cover today. These are sample app teams, apps that are posted on github. That is available for anyone to pick up, learn and use, and then you know you can also start from scratch. You know from if you have an idea and you want to learn. How do you use each of these?

A

You can also do that, but today we'll be focusing on the app templates, so diving a little deep into a place. What are they you can think of them as plug and play experiences their sample team's apps available on github, ready to use they working right out of the box with very little configuration required they're.

A

One click meant for one deployment, so we include a script that allows you to deploy and create all the scripts to Azure and they're built to meet the team's engineering standards, so they've been ensure that they're, secure and configurable, and you can also take them customize them extend.

A

However, you like, and if you look at the graph on the right I think it helps me understand really where the app templates it so it's kind of in-between using a really two user app and starting from scratch in terms of customized ability and how long it takes to get the get. Your solution deployed end to end so.

B

A

Are the benefits, so the most important one is that it's ready to go, there's very little configuration or coding required, but the good part is that you can customize it.

A

You can rename it at your organization's branding change the coloring, make it funky, whatever you can think of and add additional features that might be important to you and your organization, and it's also, since it's built with team's platform engineering quality bar it's to go out of the box and you can deploy it with one click and you can also think of it as sample code like you can learn from it play with it.

A

Even if you don't want the exact same thing it we offer many different types that connect the different interfaces, so you can play with their learn and contribute and improve the community too. Let's jump into a few different examples: I'll walk through three of our most popular app templates. To give you an idea and then we'll also walk through the catalog, so my favorite one is the company communicator. This is a very simple app in terms of what it does.

A

It allows you to message all the different users within your team's tenon and the reason why it's so powerful is especially when you have new users getting into teams and you'd want to help them point them to tips and tricks. You can compose a message and send it directly to all the users. You can even select the specific team's, however you'd like, and this came out from direct customer feedback.

A

We had a lot of customers asking for an ability to do this, and so that's why we decided to have a builder sample code base to do that. Another one of my favorite ones is called the FAQ Plus. This is a simple Q&A bot that also includes a human in the loop.

A

So imagine, if you're a person with a question about an HR policy, you can go to the bot, ask a question about it, but if it in most cases, if it doesn't answer it, you're kind of you kind of get stuck and you don't have any other place. You get frustrated because the bots not doing job well, but the FAQ Plus allows you to escalate in an expert chat.

A

One-On-One directly with them in teams and get the answer, and the expert has the option to add this new question that you asked into the knowledge base so that the next time someone asks it, the bot will be able to handle that. So it's very powerful you can think of using it in an.

B

A

Any kind of scenario where there's a where you get commonly asked questions it could be within your IT department, your legal department, there's lots of opportunities there and then moving on another fun one. It's called icebreaker. This is a one on one bot that pairs up employees within your team or organization periodically, and you can configure how you want it to do that.

A

It's a especially important in these times when we're all working remote to remind us to meet up with people and have virtual coffee chats you can you know if you're too busy one day, you can also pause the matches and from directly using the adaptive card, you can flick on buttons and chat with that person before you schedule a meeting or you can propose a meeting and it will pull up the next open slot for both of you.

A

So this is a super fun way to get your folks in your organization to meet up and- and you can learn from how adaptive cards work, how these conversational BOTS work, but through this app template, so I've compiled a few of the questions that we commonly get asked about. App templates and the first one being you know: what's the level of security and privacy and all those things within the app templates. These are like I mentioned earlier, built to be teams.

A

Engineer, meets teams, engineering standards, so we make sure that out of the box that it is secure and any improvements that we incorporate from the community gets vetted by our engineering team before it gets published and and the other common quest is what does it take to deploy these apps they're, you know meant to be.

A

We include a single deployment script and full detail instruction, so we'll walk through the an example, but I'll show you how go step by step, how to create different resources in Azure how to deploy the team's app or get it all set up so that you can get it working and can anyone deploy these apps? Yes, anyone who has the right permissions within your team's tenon can deploy it so, depending on how it's how restrictive your admin has set it up to be.

A

It might be something that you can do without any changes or you might have to reach out to your admin, but anyone with the right permissions can do it. Another common question we get asked is about the cost. This doesn't cost anything it's open source. It can be customized, you can do whatever you want with it, but the only thing I can think of is the azure resources that it uses and to help in estimate with that, we also have a cost estimate section in all of our app templates.

A

I know you might be wondering where you can learn more about it. So let's take a few minutes and jump into the entire catalog this so we'll. Let quickly walk through one of the examples so that you get an idea of what the catalog looks like so yeah. This is the whole catalog, the page that has all the different links to all the app templates that we've released on the right and on the left. You can see a quick overview of what they are pretty much.

A

What I talked about, and you know as you scroll through. You can see examples of them, there's the link to github here and we have screenshots of the key parts of the UI and if you jump into company communicator like we talked about, let's go in and.

B

A

Can see here we have detailed instructions, we have a cool refeeding in the documentation and the different sections that I talked about. Take a look at it. We have the deployment guide which walks through how to do it step-by-step. Another popular one is the cost estimate, like I, mentioned, literally exactly on an average scenario, how much it'll cost every month, based on the resources that the app template uses yeah. So that's a quick overview of it.

A

Little sneak peek into what's coming up next, so I'll be me and my colleagues will be joining the feature. Call us here and walking you through these app templates, one by one, giving a quick demo I'm showing you how to use it. So, hopefully, that'll help and I hope that your ass excited about app templates as I am yeah. That's that's me for today. Back to you is thank.

B

You here on so really cool stuff and, like Karen, said we already agreed that for the following, bi-weekly calls Pierce team himself or horse, and then somebody else is gonna. Do a real-life minute. 15 minutes live demos of the after all of the things there's so many samples available, and at least for me really the first time when I run into by an accident after in place um like what are these. Why didn't I know about this?

B

These are just absolutely brilliant because they basically demonstrate all of the native capability capabilities from Microsoft team's extensibility and they're vetted by the team's engineering, so the quality is actually there. So there's this awesome awesome starting point, just a quick question Kieran on on the. If we have partners on the on the call related on this, so I'll be basically saying that these are application templates, which partner can pull down and start building and extending them, and then they can actually package that and push to the store. Are they for that? Use it just wrong.

B

A

Great question these are open source and mighty license app templates, so they're completely free to use. You can pull them down. Customize it reuse them. How you want and get it published your internal store or to the public store, however you'd like and you can rebrand, it add, features to it. You know if you find something that you want to contribute, feel free to contribute directly to the repo or you can package it up. However, you like and and use it yeah yeah.

B

Yeah so and I think that's that's really amazing when I think of it there's like 25 more than 25 samples which are really on the right quality level on showing how to make business out of within the Microsoft team. So really really really. Please have a look on that. Whoever is in the school or watching the recording later as well, but I think that's it from that topic. Thank You, Kieran,.